Shish kebab is an English rendering of (sword or skewer) and
kebap (roasted meat dish), which dates from around the beginning of the 20th century. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest known publication in English is in the 1914 novel
Our Mr. Wrenn by
Sinclair Lewis. The word
kebab alone was already present in English by the late 17th century, from the (
kabāb), partly through Urdu, Persian and Turkish. 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. The oldest known example of , probably originally meaning a pointed stick, comes from the 11th-century
Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, attributed to
Mahmud of Kashgar. == Gallery ==