The word
chorba in English and in many Balkan languages is a loan from the
Ottoman Turkish , which itself is a loan from
Persian . The spelling
shorba could be a direct loan into English from Persian or through a Central or South Asian intermediary. The word is ultimately a compound of meaning 'salty, brackish' and meaning 'stew, gruel, spoon-meat'. The former is from
Parthian meaning 'salty', and the latter from
Middle Persian meaning 'gruel, spoon-meat'. The etymology can be definitively tied to Persian through the cognate ; in modern Persian, while evolved to mean 'broth, stew', simply means 'soup'. It is typical for Middle Persian word-final to either change to or to be dropped altogether in Modern Persian. The
dialectal Arabic word also a loan from Persian while is a
phono-semantic matching that occurred during the loaning of the word into Arabic and is etymologically tied to meaning 'to drink'. Chorba is also called (), (), (), (), (), (
Somali), (
Romanian), (), ( / ), (
Turkish), (), () and
shorba in (
Hindustani: / ). In the Indian subcontinent, the term is commonly used to mean gravy. It is a
Mughlai dish and it also has vegetarian forms. ==Types==