manioc

Etymology

From French manioc and Spanish mandioca, ultimately from Old Tupi mani'oka.

noun

1. (countable, uncountable) The tropical plant Manihot esculenta, from which cassava and tapioca are prepared.
   1975, William R. Bascom, African Dilemma Tales, Mouton (De Gruyter), page 86, The banana, the most important crop above ground, quarreled with the manioc, the most important underground crop. […] The manioc said that it, the yam, the sweet potato, and others were the ones that fed people and that without them people could not exist.
   1977, Donald W. Lathrap, Our Father the Cayman, Our Mother the Gourd, Charles A. Reed (editor), Origins of Agriculture, Mouton (De Gruyter), page 741, The selection process leading to the bitter group of maniocs has been in terms of higher starch yield and in terms of starch of a quality more appropriate for making bread ans flour.
   Manioc, the main subsistence crop of Amazonia, is planted entirely from cuttings, which are inserted into mounds hoed up in the spaces left between the logs and the stumps. 1988, Robert L. Carneiro, “5: Indians of the Amazonian Rainforest”, in Julie Sloan Denslow, Christine Padoch, editors, People of the Tropical Rain Forest, University of California Press, page 82
   Manioc was first reported being grown on the mainland in 1635 at the Portuguese post at Bissau. 1993, Jonathan D. Sauer, Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster, CRC Press, page 60
   Manioc gives the highest yield of starch per hectare of any known crop; some 90% of the fabric of the crop can be regarded as potentially fermentable carbohydrate. 2003, Ian Spencer Hornsey, A History of Beer and Brewing, Royal Society of Chemistry, page 26
2. (uncountable) Cassava root, eaten as a food.
   Ground manioc (cassava) is mixed with water and pressed through tube woven from palm fibers to remove toxic cyanogenic compounds. 2006, Dietland Muller-Schwarze, Chemical Ecology of Vertebrates, Cambridge University Press, page 321
   She made manioc pie, got water, got wild banana leaves and pounded manioc. She made the earth oven and later she opened and took out the manioc pie. 2013, Elizabeth Ewart, Space and Society in Central Brazil: A Panará Ethnography, Bloomsbury, page 174
3. (uncountable) A food starch prepared from the root.