Corn, maize, grain and wheat, are they all the same?

Today I am going to talk about a linguistic doublet related to food, that is, corn and grain. When we hear these words, we all think about the same, and in this case, we are right. That is why, in English, both mean exactly the same, since both come from the same curious and ancient Proto-Indo-European word, “grnom”. Although some linguists do not consider that as correct, and admit the word maize as the actual synonym of corn.

Anyway, the curious thing about this is that the word grnom was split into corn (which reached England through the German language) and grain (which comes from the Latin word “granum”). Then, the most important food in medieval period also conveys its own etymological development related to the historical one which England had.

But what does corn exactly mean? In British English, it is used to refer to 'cereal', and in many occasions, to 'wheat', the favorite cereal of Europe (that is why its etymology has spread so similarly through Europe). When people in the New World (the "Indies") found this cereal, that was new to them, they named it Indian corn. At the same time, the Caribbean word “maize” travelled from America to Spain, where it turned to “maíz”, though “grano” was also used to refer to what In English is called wheat and grain.

This circular and dizzy reconstruction of how the name of the most common food in Europe history was created, lead us to a daily question: what are corn flakes made from? Since they were invented in the United States, they are made up of Indian corn, but British people nowadays believe that they are made from wheat, because that is what corn means in Britain.