Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

The word maize comes from the language of the Taino, a native island people of the West Indies in the Caribbean. Harvested throughout the Americas for millenia, maize was a crop foreign to early European explorers, who took both the grain and the word back to their homelands, and to Asia and Africa as well.

When Europeans began to colonize the New World, they found the North American natives cultivating and processing maize, too. The colonists initially considered the indigenous crop unfit for human consumption, and fed it to their livestock, but eventually they learned to appreciate its versatility and nutritional value, and maize began to gradually appear on colonial dining tables.

The immigrants were inclined to call the grain Indian corn, corn being an Old English word referring to a particle, or a small seed or any type of cereal grain. But gradually the qualifier word Indian was nipped off this term, leaving the simple English word corn. This was an ironic linguistic development, since most of Europe still knows this grain best by its native name, maize!

Find out more about the word corn in an excellent book called the Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto.

Radio Script > Corn