Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1914, from Armenian shish kabab, from Turkish siskebap, from sis "skewer" + kebap "roast meat."
Wiktionary
n. 1 A dish made of small pieces of meat, with or without vegetables, which are skewered on a wooden or metal stick and roasted in an oven or over an open fire. 2 (context chemistry English) A crystal structure consisting of a central spine (the ''shish'') and disks or lumps growing out from it (the ''kebab'').
WordNet
Wikipedia
Shish kebab is a Turkish cuisine dish of skewered and grilled cubes of meat. The term shish kebab has a history of over one hundred years in English. In American English, the word kebab refers to shish kebab, while in British English, kebab may also mean döner kebab or shawarma. In Middle Eastern cuisine however, kebab denotes a wide variety of different grilled meat dishes. Shish is the Turkish word for sword or skewer.
Probably the best known Turkish dish outside Turkey, shish kebab is generally made of lamb (kuzu şiş) but there are also versions with beef or veal (dana şiş), swordfish (kılıç şiş) and chicken meat (tavuk şiş or şiş tavuk). A traditional Turkish dish, it may be considered a kebab variant, although it is more similar to shashlik of the Caucasus region. (Shashlyk is the Russian word for şiş kebap.) In Turkey, şiş kebap and the vegetables served with it are grilled separately, normally not on the same skewer.
Usage examples of "shish kebab".
While Petrofsky was crouched over his one-time pad deciphering the message and the Stephanides brothers were serving moussaka and shish kebab to a line of people who had just left the nearby bars at closing time, Preston was in the police station, on the phone to Sir Bernard Hemmings.
When I was in Detroit, though, I used to haunt Greektown for shish kebab, taramasalata, and saganaki.
Davo guffawed, so Helva decided he'd been told about the shish kebab episode.
The knife came out the other side with the thing's Adam's apple skewered on it like a piece of steak on a shish kebab.
If eternal existence is such a pain in the ass, how come I don't see you throwing yourself on a shish kebab skewer, or running chest-first into a low-hanging pointy branch, or going out to Sunnydale and looking up Bully's phone number?
After dinner they sat in Zeyk and Nazik's rover, and relaxed eating sherbet that Zeyk passed around, while staring into the coals of a little brazier fire on which Zeyk had earlier cooked shish kebab.