cereal

1. 1.

   grass whose starchy grains are used as food: wheat; rice; rye; oats; maize; buckwheat; millet

   Synonymscereal grass

   Broadergrass

   Narroweroatbarleyricericegrasspearl milletryemilletgrainwheatcorn
2. 2.

   foodstuff prepared from the starchy grains of cereal grasses

   Synonymsgrainfood grain

   Broaderfoodstuff

   Narrowercorngristgroatsmilletbarleybuckwheatwheatoatricewild rice
3. 3.

   a breakfast food prepared from grain

   Broaderbreakfast food

   NarrowerPablumhot cerealcold cereal

1. 1.

   made of grain or relating to grain or the plants that produce it

   “a cereal beverage”

   “cereal grasses”

Other forms of cereal

plural

cereals·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about cereal

What does cereal mean?

cereal means "grass whose starchy grains are used as food: wheat; rice; rye; oats; maize; buckwheat; millet". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cereal?

cereal has 3 syllables: cer-e-al. The stress falls on "cer". In IPA it is /ˈsɪɹiəl/.

What is another word for cereal?

Close synonyms include cereal grass, grain, food grain. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is cereal a common word?

cereal is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.