The Etymology of Kebab
Kebab is one of the most successful Middle Eastern food words in English. Arabic kabāb (كَبَاب) means grilled meat and is built on a Semitic root k-b-b that carries the sense of charring or burning. The word travelled with cooking methods across the Persianate and Turkic worlds, becoming Persian kabāb and Turkish kebap. English speakers picked up the word from Ottoman Turkish during 17th- and 18th-century travel and trade, and the simple form kebab is recorded by 1813. The familiar compounds describe specific preparations: şiş kebap is skewer-meat (Turkish şiş, skewer), and döner kebap is turning meat — döner being the present participle of dönmek (to turn), describing the vertical rotating spit invented in 19th-century Bursa. South Asian cuisine has a parallel tradition: seekh kebab, where Urdu seekh again means skewer, while shami and galouti kebabs are minced rather than skewered. The same Arabic root has thus produced an entire constellation of grilled-meat words across three continents.