kebab
n. countablen. a dish of small pieces of meat and vegetables cooked on a metal or wooden stick. You often find them at street food stalls or casual restaurants.
n. a dish consisting of small pieces of meat, poultry, or vegetables that are seasoned and grilled on a skewer. Often associated with Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and South Asian cuisines.
We cooked a chicken kebab on the grill for dinner.
After the concert, the group stopped at a local stand for a spicy lamb kebab.
From Arabic كَبَاب (kabāb), partly through Urdu, Persian and Turkish kebap. Doublet of cevapi. See the Arabic entry for more.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Countable when referring to the individual skewer or the specific dish; occasionally uncountable when referring to the meat itself in a generic sense.
Last updated May 11, 2026