"Corn" is the general word for the most common cereal crop of a region, and the word for an individual grain of such a plant, in case you wish to use the corn-on-a-chessboard story without the qualification.

That seems to be true only in British English. In other dialects (USA, Canada, Australia), corn refers only to maize. (I'd never heard corn used as a general term, though Miriam-Webster does affirm this British usage.)