Barbecue

How to spell barbecue

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce barbecue

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does barbecue mean?

1. nounAn outdoor meal or social gathering where food is cooked over an open fire or grill, or the grill apparatus itself.
2. verbTo cook food over an open fire, hot coals, or a grill, often outdoors.

Barbecue in a sentence

• noun

  They hosted a summer barbecue for the whole street.

• verb

  They plan to barbecue ribs and corn on Saturday afternoon.

• noun

  He scrubbed the barbecue before lighting the coals.

• verb

  It is easier to barbecue chicken once the coals turn grey.

Where does barbecue come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word came into English in the seventeenth century from the Spanish barbacoa, which the Spanish had themselves picked up from the Taino people of the Caribbean, an Arawakan group encountered during early colonisation. In the original Taino sense, a barbacoa was a raised wooden framework of sticks, used both for sleeping above the ground and for slowly drying or smoking meat and fish over a fire. English speakers borrowed the cooking idea, and the meaning gradually broadened from the wooden rack itself to the method of cooking, then to the social gathering built around it. The spelling has always been unsettled: because the final syllable sounds like the letters of cue, people are endlessly tempted to write barbeque or simply BBQ, but the standard spelling preserves the older barbecue with -cue. Knowing it descends from a Caribbean word, not from French or Latin, helps explain why none of its parts behave like familiar English roots.

How the word is built

• barbecue (a single unanalysable borrowing from Spanish barbacoa; no English prefix or suffix, the trap is the -cue ending rather than -que)