It is one of the many types of
kebab, a range of meat dishes originating in the
Middle East. In North American English, the word kebab alone often refers to shish kebab, though outside of North America, kebab may also mean
doner kebab.
It is traditionally made of
lamb[3] but there are also versions with various kinds of meat, poultry, or fish.[4] In
Turkey, shish kebab and the vegetables served with it are grilled separately, normally not on the same skewer.[5]
Etymology
Shish kebab is an English rendering of
Turkish: şiş (sword or skewer) and kebap (roasted meat dish), that dates from around the beginning of the 20th century.[6][7] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest known publication in English is in the 1914 novel Our Mr. Wrenn by
Sinclair Lewis.[6][8]
The word kebab alone was already present in English by the late 17th century, from the
Arabic: كَبَاب (kabāb), partly through Urdu, Persian and Turkish.[9] Etymologist
Sevan Nişanyan states that the word has the equivalent meaning of "frying/burning" with "kabābu" in the old
Akkadian language, and "kbabā/כבבא" in
Aramaic.[10] The oldest known example of şiş, probably originally meaning a pointed stick, comes from the 11th-century Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, attributed to
Mahmud of Kashgar.[11][12]