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wheat

/ˈwiːt/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,446 of 15,258neutral

Wheat is the grain that most bread flour is made from. A field of wheat, wheat flour, wheat harvest.

It is the only common grain with enough gluten to trap gas well, which is why bread rises and why loaves made from other flours are dense. It covers more of the world's farmland than any other crop. Note that the word is Germanic and related to white, from the pale flour.

kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of wheat

  1. 1nounwheatThe grain most bread flour is made from.B2

    “Fields of golden wheat stretched as far as we could see.”

wheat is a grain.

Where it comes from

Old English hwaete is related to white, from the colour of the flour. German Weizen is the same word.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *hwaitijaz

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *hwaitī

  3. Old English

    hwǣte

  4. Middle English

    whete

  5. English, today

    wheat

Built from

  • *hwītaz · Proto-Germanic — white

From Middle English whete, from Old English hwǣte, from Proto-West Germanic hwaitī, from Proto-Germanic hwaitijaz (compare West Frisian weet, Dutch weit, Low German Weten, German Weizen, Danish hvede, Swedish vete, Norwegian Bokmål hvete, Norwegian Nynorsk kveite, Faroese and Icelandic hveiti), from hwītaz (“white”). More at white.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

wheat in the wild

  • World trade in wheat is greater than that of all other crops combined.

    Wheat

  • In 2024, world wheat production was 799 million tonnes, making it the second most-produced cereal after maize (known as corn in North America and Australia).

    Wheat

  • A wheat-rye hybrid, triticale, combines the qualities of the two parent crops and is produced in large quantities worldwide.

    Rye

  • Cassava flour is gluten-free and used as an alternative to wheat flour.

    Flour

  • Seitan is a food made from gluten, the main protein of wheat.

    Seitan

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.