In today’s English, barbecue is the usual spelling of the word with several senses related to the cooking of food over open fire. It’s the spelling that tends to appear in edited writing, and it’s the one that dictionaries note first, for what that’s worth (and some don’t note any other spellings). Barbeque is a secondary spelling that appears especially often in the names of restaurants and products. It has steadily gained ground over the last few decades, but it is still far less common than barbecue overall.





The word has been spelled several ways since coming to English from the Spanish barbacoa in the 18th century (its earlier origins are fuzzy, though the conventional wisdom is that the Spanish adapted it from a term used among Caribbean natives).1 In the OED’s historical examples there are barbecu, barbacue, barbicu, and babracot,2 and today there are several abbreviated forms, including bar-b-q and just BBQ. Despite the many forms, barbecue gained clear ascendancy in the late 19th century, and it has gone unchallenged ever since.3

Examples






Sources

1. Jake Adam York, “The Marrow of the Bone of Contention: A Barbecue Journal,” via storySouth. ↩

2. Barbecue in the OED ↩

3. Google ngram graphing several forms, 1800-1900 ↩