teosinte

American

[tee-uh-sin-tee, tey-] / ˌti əˈsɪn ti, ˌteɪ- /

noun

a tall grass, Zea mexicana, of Mexico and Central America, closely related to corn, and sometimes cultivated as a fodder plant.

teosinte British

/ ˌtiːəʊˈsɪntɪ /

noun

a tall Central American annual grass, Euchlaena mexicana, related to maize and grown for forage in the southern US

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of teosinte

1875–80; < Mexican Spanish < Nahuatl teōcintli, equivalent to teō ( tl ) god + cintli dried ear of maize

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Corn was born here about 9,000 years ago, when Mesoamerican farmers first started to domesticate the wild grass known as teosinte.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 13, 2025

And yet experts all agree that the genus teosinte is the ancestral form of all modern varieties of maize.

From Science Daily • May 22, 2024

They found that about 20 percent of the genome of all maize worldwide comes from this second highland teosinte.

From Science Daily • Nov. 30, 2023

The influx of genetic variation from the highland teosinte may have “turned it into something that is really dependable.”

From Science Magazine • Nov. 29, 2023

Maize originated, litis postulated, in a strange, wholesale mutation of teosinte, to which Indians added and subtracted features through intensive breeding.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023