Carolina Barbecue

a wordbarbecue

also: bar-b-q · bar-b-que · barbeque · BBQ · 'cue · cue · Q

In the Carolinas the word is a noun for the cooked pork: you eat barbecue, you do not 'have a barbecue'. The grill in the yard is a grill; cooking on it is grilling.

A state News Bureau sheet of four prints headed Barbeque, Braswell Plantation near Rocky Mount, Sept 1944. One shows a crowd standing among tall pines with plates in their hands, children in front, wagons and mules at the treeline. One shows a queue several hundred people long curving away under the trees. One looks down on servers working a line of trestle tables spread with large pans, people filing past with plates. The fourth is close: a woman and three small children sitting on the grass, plates of food and a cup set out on the ground beside them, the smallest child in a white sun hat eating with her fingers.
A state News Bureau sheet of four prints headed Barbeque, Braswell Plantation near Rocky Mount, Sept 1944. One shows a crowd standing among tall pines with plates in their hands, children in front, wagons and mules at the treeline. One shows a queue several hundred people long curving away under the trees. One looks down on servers working a line of trestle tables spread with large pans, people filing past with plates. The fourth is close: a woman and three small children sitting on the grass, plates of food and a cup set out on the ground beside them, the smallest child in a white sun hat eating with her fingers. — John Hemmer; State Archives of North Carolina, No known copyright restrictions

The cooked meat itself — in the Carolinas, pork cooked slowly over coals or in a cooker and then chopped, pulled or sliced — and, by extension, the place that sells it and the gathering that eats it. Elsewhere in the country the same word means a grill, or a cookout of any meat; here the narrower sense is the ordinary one.

Root. Taíno (Arawakan) barbacoa, a framework of sticks set on posts → Spanish barbacoa (1526, Oviedo) → English barbecue (1660s: the frame and the method; the cooked animal and the gathering by the 1700s)
First seen. English 1661, Edmund Hickeringill's Jamaica Viewed ('Barbacu'd'), per the OED as quoted in the Wikipedia article; 'barbecado' in 1648; as a noun 1697, William Dampier. Spanish barbacoa printed by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, 1526.
The folk etymology from French barbe à queue ('beard to tail', i.e. the whole animal) is a joke first printed in the eighteenth century and has no standing; the Taíno origin is the dictionary etymology. Spellings with -que and Bar-B-Q are twentieth-century sign-painting and are as common on Carolina signs as the dictionary form. Cited · wp-barbecue

The story Tradition

The word came north from the Caribbean with the Spanish and into English by way of the colonial Atlantic: a frame of sticks first, then the method, then the meat. Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 already gives the Carolina sense — 'to barbecue: a term for dressing a whole hog', and the noun, 'a hog dressed whole'. Tradition holds — the whole-animal feast over wood coals was the shape of the colonial Southern gathering by the eighteenth century, and the political barbecue, a free feed put on by a candidate, was an institution of the early republic. Inference — the Carolina insistence that barbecue is a noun for pork is a memory of that feast: what was cooked at the rally was the pig, and the pig was what you came for.

Facts

part of speechnoun
regionThe Carolinas, The American South
linksbarbecue — Online Etymology Dictionary · Barbecue — Wikipedia (Etymology)
confidencehigh · updated 2026-09-15

Its kin

stylesEastern North Carolina barbecueone of the two North Carolina answers to what the word means: the whole hog, chopped, with vinegar.and of this page it says: the word, which in the east is a noun for this chopped pork and nothing else.stylesLexington-style barbecuethe other North Carolina answer: pork shoulder with a red dip.and of this page it says: the word, which in the Piedmont is a noun for chopped shoulder with dip.eventspig pickin'the gathering the word also names — a barbecue as an event, still a pig.and of this page it says: the noun the east uses for what comes off the pig, and the word for the gathering itself.

Who points back

dishes · says of this pagebarbecue chickenthe noun that excludes it: barbecue is pork, chicken is chicken.places · says of this pageLewis Barbecuethe word, meaning beef on this menu.places · says of this pageSmithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Qthe word on 41 signs, spelled three ways.places · says of this pageThe Fiction Kitchenthe word, stretched to cover a dish cooked without an animal — which is a thing the word is doing in the Carolinas now.people · says of this pageJohn Shelton Reedthe word his 2016 Savor the South book takes as its whole title.people · says of this pageRobert F. Mosshis 2010 history is the source behind the colonial feast and the political barbecue in the word's story.events · says of this pagepolitical barbecuethe word that also names the gathering.words · says of this pagehogthe word that in the east means the hog after cooking.words · says of this pagepulled porkthe Carolina word for the same meat; pulled pork is what it is called when the menu speaks to the rest of the country.art · says of this pagebarbecue postcardsthe word as a card caption, which is how a business told a stranger what it sold.art · says of this pagethe pig that serves itselfthe word most of these signs spell Bar-B-Q, because the hyphens fit a pylon better.art · says of this pageGoing the whole hog — the 1830s barbecue lithographsthe word a bystander in the 1834 print says South Carolina uses, while Massachusetts says roasting.art · says of this pageroadside barbecue signsthe word, spelled Bar-B-Q, because it fits a tall cabinet.stories · says of this pageHow to orderthe word itself, which here is a noun for pork.

Pictures

A state News Bureau sheet of four prints headed Barbeque, Braswell Plantation near Rocky Mount, Sept 1944. One shows a crowd standing among tall pines with plates in their hands, children in front, wagons and mules at the treeline. One shows a queue several hundred people long curving away under the trees. One looks down on servers working a line of trestle tables spread with large pans, people filing past with plates. The fourth is close: a woman and three small children sitting on the grass, plates of food and a cup set out on the ground beside them, the smallest child in a white sun hat eating with her fingers.
John Hemmer; State Archives of North Carolina · No known copyright restrictions
A crowded outdoor serving line, printed as a newspaper halftone so the dot screen shows. Along the near side of long trestle tables, women in aprons and short sleeves serve: one ladles from a metal bucket, another lifts bread rolls out of a big open cardboard carton, a third fills a plate held out to her. Men in shirtsleeves, ties and summer hats file past on the far side with plates and bowls. Behind them the queue winds back uphill among trees past a wooden rail fence, dozens more people standing and sitting on the slope. A galvanised tub stands in the near corner.
Greenville County Library System · Public domain

Sources

Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.

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