sugarcane

American  

[shoog-er-keyn] / ˈʃʊg ərˌkeɪn /

Or sugar cane

noun

1. a tall grass, Saccharum officinarum, of tropical and warm regions, having a stout, jointed stalk, and constituting the chief source of sugar.

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Etymology

Origin of sugarcane

First recorded in 1560–70; sugar + cane

Explanation

Sugarcane is a tall, grassy plant that's used to make sugar. The majority of sugarcane is grown in Brazil. Most of the world's sugar is produced from sugarcane — and in recent years, that's meant a total of about 1.8 billion tons of harvested sugarcane annually. Special factories process the cut cane, extracting sugar crystals from inside its stalks, then evaporating moisture from the crystals to create fine, white table sugar. Other sugar products come from sugarcane as well, including molasses and cane syrup.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

sugarcane

India's main summer crops include rice, pulses, coarse cereals, oilseeds, cotton, sugarcane and jute.

From BBC ● Jul. 1, 2026

Other humans, like Mariana Aidar, president of the animal-welfare nonprofit Projeto CAPA—the woman presently holding out the sugarcane to the capybara snacking away on the riverbank—are fighting for their capybara neighbors to survive.

From Slate ● May 27, 2026

A new type of artificial saliva, delivered as a mouthwash and made using a lab-modified sugarcane protein called CANECPI-5, could help protect the teeth of patients with head and neck cancer.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 5, 2026

In outdoor settings, sugarcane and palm were more prolific than algae in the results that Exxon researchers shared with Wojnar, while corn was about on par, the internal documents show.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 31, 2026

There are food carts on every corner, selling everything from ripe mangoes to sugarcane, from Western cakes to French crepes.

From "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers" by Loung Ung