Sugarcane is the tall tropical grass that most of the world's sugar comes from. It grows two or three metres high, with thick jointed stems full of sweet juice. The stems are crushed, the juice is boiled down, and what is left is sugar. It grows in hot wet places — Brazil, India, Thailand, and once, very famously, in Taiwan.

The word is usually uncountable: 'a field of sugarcane', 'they grow sugarcane'. When you want one piece, say 'a stick of sugarcane' or 'a stalk of sugarcane'. You will see it written three ways — sugarcane, sugar cane, sugar-cane — and all are accepted; the one-word spelling is now the most common.

For Taiwanese students this word carries history that English speakers do not feel. Under Japanese rule sugarcane was the island's great cash crop, the sugar railways ran everywhere, and 甘蔗 still means childhood, hard farm work, and the sweet juice sold at markets. Note also that in English, 'cane' by itself often means the plant in farming talk ('the cane harvest'), and 'cane sugar' means sugar from this plant, as opposed to beet sugar.