Other forms: corns
Corn is the tall yellow plant with sweet seeds packed along a cob. Boiled, buttered, and eaten from the hand.
There is a real transatlantic trap here. In American English corn means this plant, called maize elsewhere. In older British English corn means whatever grain the district grows, most often wheat, which is why a cornfield in an English novel is usually wheat. Sweetcorn is the unambiguous British word. There is also a corn on the foot, a hard painful patch of skin, which is an unrelated word entirely.
1nouncornA tall cereal plant with large yellow seeds on a cob.
“They roasted corn over the fire.”
2nounhardA hard painful patch of thickened skin on the foot.
“He had a corn on his little toe.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: sweetcorn, maize
Corn and grain are the same idea arriving by different roads. The Proto-Indo-European word meant grain and also worn-down, from a root about growing old, so a seed is simply what the plant has ripened into.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵerh₂-
Middle English
corn
English, today
corn
Built from
From Middle English corn. Middle English corn, from Old English corn, from Proto-West Germanic korn, from Proto-Germanic kurną, from Proto-Indo-European ǵr̥h₂nóm (“grain; worn-down”), from ǵerh₂- (“grow old, mature”). Cognate with Dutch koren, German Low German Koorn, German Korn, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish korn; see also Albanian grurë, Russian зерно́, Czech zrno, Latin grānum and Lithuanian žirnis. a doublet of grain and gram and granum and grao.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA