tapioca

Etymology

From Portuguese tapioca, from Old Tupi tapi'oka.

noun

1. A starchy food made from the cassava plant, used in puddings.
   Fish eyes and glue we used to call the half-cooked, large-grained, starchy tapioca without flavour that we were served every week in our residence at university. How I longed for the creamy pudding Mother used to make. 2009, Edna Staebler, Food That Really Schmecks, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, page 286
2. The cassava plant, Manihot esculenta, from which tapioca is derived; manioc.
   When the entire coast-line becomes a sea of waving palms, with Chinese and Malay villages fringing the shores, which are at present mere barren wastes of mangroves, with plantations of pepper, of gambier, and of tapioca and rice, the Northern Territory, backed up by the unswerving energy of the Australian squatter, miner, and planter, will present a spectacle almost unknown in the scheme of British colonization. 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 270