What Is the Correct Pronunciation of “Gyro”?

In the United States, there is something of an intense debate over how the word gyro is supposed to be pronounced. Many people pronounce it /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ (or, to use fauxnetics, “JAI-roh’). Many other people, however, insist that it is supposed to be pronounced /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ (that is, “YEE-roh” in fauxnetics). This debate even made it into the recent Disney Pixar animated film Soul, which includes a flashback scene in which a mischievous unborn soul named “Twenty-Two” is portrayed as arguing with the spirit of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) over the correct pronunciation of the word.

If I were an ordinary pedant, I would simply tell you that the pronunciation /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ is correct and that the people who say /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ are wrong. I, however, am no ordinary pedant. On the contrary, I am the most obnoxious and loathsome kind of pedant: a pedant who has spent years studying the Greek language at the university level and who knows far too much about it for my own good.

Therefore, I feel the need to point out that neither of the pronunciations given above is reflective of the actual pronunciation of the word in Modern Greek, since the nominative singular form of the word in Greek is actually γύρος (gýros), with an /s/ sound on the end, and the nominative plural form is actually γύροι (gýroi). Moreover, I feel the need to explain exactly why the way the word is spelled in English is so different from how it is pronounced in Greek and to explain precisely how the debate over the pronunciation of the word arose.

A little background

In order to understand the roots of the present controversy over how the word gyro should be pronounced, we need to understand why Greek words are often transliterated in ways that don’t reflect how they are actually pronounced.

In order to understand this, we need to go all the way back to Classical Attic Greek, the dialect of the Greek language that was spoken in the region of Attike, which includes the city of Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, since, as strange as it may sound, the modern system of transliterating Greek words into English is based primarily on equivalences between Greek letters as they were pronounced in the Classical Attic dialect and Roman letters as they were pronounced in Classical Latin over two thousand years ago.

In Classical Attic Greek, γυρός was not the name of a particular kind of sandwich, but rather simply an adjective meaning “round.” Here’s the breakdown of how the word would have been pronounced in Athens in the fifth century BCE:

• In Classical Attic Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩ was usually pronounced as the voiced velar plosive /g/ like the letter ⟨g⟩ in the English word got.

• The letter ⟨υ⟩ was usually pronounced as the close front rounded vowel sound /y/ like the letter ⟨ü⟩ in the German word über.

• The letter ⟨ρ⟩ was pronounced as the voiced alveolar trill /r/ like the letter ⟨r⟩ in Modern Spanish or Italian.

• The letter ⟨o⟩ was pronounced as a short close-mid back rounded vowel /o/ similar to the sound made by the letter ⟨o⟩ in the English word tote.

• The letter ⟨σ⟩, which is conventionally written ⟨ς⟩ when it occurs at the end of a word, was pronounced as the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ like the letter ⟨s⟩ in the English word this.

Thus, in Classical Attic Greek, the word γυρός was pronounced /ɡyː.rós/.

During the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE), a new dialect of the Greek language known as “Koine” developed. Koine Greek was based primarily on Classical Attic Greek, but it was also influenced to some extent by other ancient Greek dialects. It became widely spoken throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean.

In Koine, the adjective γυρός was nominalized to become the second-declension masculine noun γῦρος, which means “circle,” “ring,” or “rotation.” Through this nominalization, the accent shifted from an acute accent on the ultima (i.e., the last syllable) to a circumflex accent on the penult (i.e., the second to last syllable), resulting in the noun form being pronounced /ɡŷː.ros/.

ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons of a circle. The word γῦρος or γύρος in Greek literally means “circle” or “rotation.”

Sound shifts in Koine and Medieval Greek

At some point between the second century BCE and the third century CE, the consonant sounds represented by the letter ⟨γ⟩ shifted. From roughly this period onwards, ⟨γ⟩ became pronounced as a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ before the vowels ⟨α⟩, ⟨ο⟩, and ⟨ω⟩. Meanwhile, it became pronounced as a voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/ before the front vowels ⟨ε⟩, ⟨η⟩, ⟨ι⟩, and ⟨υ⟩. This is a sound very similar to, but slightly different from, the voiced palatal approximant, which is generally represented in English by the consonantal ⟨y⟩.

Other changes in the pronunciation of the Greek language took place during the Middle Ages. By the Middle Byzantine Period, it seems that uneducated people in the countryside of Greece had begun to pronounce the letter ⟨υ⟩ as the close front unrounded vowel /i/, which is the sound made by the letter ⟨i⟩ in the English word machine. This shift occurred as part of a well-attested process known as “iotacism,” which resulted in the letters ⟨ι⟩, ⟨η⟩, and ⟨υ⟩, which had originally represented three different sounds in Classical Attic Greek, coming to all eventually represent the same sound in Standard Modern Greek.

This shift in the popular rural pronunciation seems to have greatly perturbed the educated elites at the time. In around the eleventh century CE, the Greek writer Michael the Grammarian wrote a satirical poem in which a speaker complains about the way uneducated people in the countryside were pronouncing the letter upsilon. He declares:

“Ἐμοὶ πατρίς, βέλτιστε, τραχὺ χωρίον,
ὅπου περ ἀνδρῶν καὶ βοῶν ἶσαι φρένες,
οἳ το κρύον λέγουσιν ἀφρόνως κρίον,
καὶ τὸ ξύλον λέγουσιν ἀγροίκως ξίλον.”

This means (in my own translation):

“My fatherland, oh dearest one, is a coarse village,
where the minds of men and cows are just the same.
They foolishly say ‘κρίον’ instead of ‘κρύον’
and they boorishly say ‘ξίλον’ instead of ‘ξύλον.’”

Over time, the pronunciation that Michael derided as coarse and uncivilized seems to have won out; in Standard Modern Greek, the letters ⟨υ⟩ and ⟨ι⟩ are both pronounced /i/. Thus, in Standard Modern Greek, the word γύρος is pronounced /ˈʝiros/.

ABOVE: Scene of everyday agricultural workers from an eleventh-century Greek manuscript of the gospels. It’s very likely that such laborers would have pronounced ⟨υ⟩ as /i/, while the scribe who copied the manuscript probably pronounced it /y/.

Origin of the gyros sandwich

Now that I’ve explained the origin of the Greek word γύρος and the history of its pronunciation, I should probably explain where the sandwich of this name originates from and how the name came to be applied to the sandwich.

Today in modern Greece, a cook who is preparing a gyros begins by roasting the meat vertically on a skewer and slicing pieces of meat away when they are done cooking. In Greece and Kypros, gyroi are normally made using pork, but a cook may sometimes choose to use chicken, beef, or lamb meat instead. Once the meat has been removed from the skewer, the cook usually serves it wrapped in pita bread as a sandwich. Often, it is served with tzatziki sauce, onions, and tomatoes.

The modern gyros didn’t arise all at once; many innovations had to be made before the gyros as we know it today could be invented. The first of these innovations was the invention of the idea of cooking meat on spits. This idea is extremely ancient; we know that people in the Aegean Islands were already roasting meat on horizontal spits at least over 3,600 years ago, and they were probably doing it long before that as well. Archaeologists excavating the Bronze Age site of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera unearthed stone firedogs dating to the seventeenth century BCE or earlier with notches clearly designed to hold skewers for roasting meats.

The Iliad, an ancient Greek epic poem that was most likely composed in around the early seventh century BCE, describes Chryses, the Trojan priest of the god Apollon, roasting meat on horizontal wooden skewers in book one, lines 458–466. The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) references similar cooking practices in his plays Acharnians (line 1007), The Clouds (line 178), The Wasps (line 354), and The Birds (lines 388 and 672). Today, meats grilled on horizontal spits are known in Greece as souvlakia; they are distinct from, but similar, to gyroi.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a pair of stone firedogs used for roasting meat on skewers, discovered at the site of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera, dating to the seventeenth century BCE or earlier

The various other ingredients that are used in gyroi today also had to be introduced to Greece. Some of these ingredients were introduced to the Greek diet relatively early. Notably, pita bread—or at least a very similar kind of flatbread—is known to have existed in ancient Greece. The Greek Egyptian writer Athenaios of Naukratis, who wrote sometime in around the late second or early third century CE, quotes a description of the cooking process for a kind of flatbread known as apanthrakis in his book Wise Men at Dinner 3.110b. The description reads as follows, as translated by S. Douglas Olson:

“The apanthrakis is more delicate than wafer bread. This type too is probably produced on top of coals, like what Attic authors refer to as an enkryphia. The inhabitants of Alexandria offer it to Kronos and put it out in his temple for anyone who wants some to eat.”

Similarly, onions, which are often served on gyroi today, were fairly common in ancient Greek cuisine and they are often mentioned as an ingredient in surviving ancient Greek recipes.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of loaves of pita bread in the city of Nablus in the West Bank. Similar flatbreads are known to have already existed in ancient times.

Cucumbers and garlic—which are among the main ingredients used in the making of tzatziki sauce—were certainly well known to the ancient Greeks, since they are mentioned in various ancient Greek and Roman texts. The other main ingredient in tzatziki is yoghurt, which the ancient Greeks may have eaten also; ancient sources describe a kind of dairy product known as ὀξύγαλα (oxýgala), which seems to have been a kind of thick yoghurt. The Greek medical writer Galenos of Pergamon (lived c. 129 – c. 210 CE) mentions that it was apparently often sweetened with honey.

In any case, we have no evidence to suggest that the ancient Greeks ever combined yoghurt and cucumbers to make tzatziki. Instead, the earliest reference to tzatziki seems to come from the French writer Pierre Belon (lived 1517 – 1564), who mentions in his Observations 1.66 that Greek and Turkish people living in the Ottoman Empire during his time would sometimes grind cloves of garlic and mix them with oxygala to make a dish that sounds like tzatziki, only without the cucumbers. It is unclear exactly when cucumbers were finally added to the mix.

Meanwhile, the practice of cooking meat vertically in the style of a döner kebap seems to have originated in western Asia Minor. The city of Bursa in northwest Turkey is reported to be the exact city in which the döner kebap was invented. We don’t know exactly when the process of vertically roasting meat originated, but it certainly originated before the middle of the nineteenth century. The earliest surviving photograph of anyone cooking meat in the döner kebap style was taken in the Ottoman Empire in 1855.

ABOVE: Photograph taken in the Ottoman Empire in 1855 showing a cook roasting meat vertically in a döner kebap style

The very last ingredient used in the making of gyroi to be introduced to the Greek-speaking world were tomatoes, which originate from the Americas and were first introduced to Greece in around 1815. At first, tomatoes weren’t very well known or very popular; they only started to become prominent in Greek cooking towards the very end of the nineteenth century.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey conducted a “population exchange” along religious lines, in which Greece expelled most of its Muslim citizens for them to be resettled in Turkey and Turkey expelled most of its Greek Orthodox citizenships for them to be resettled in Greece. Many of the Greek Orthodox people expelled from Turkey were resettled in the region of Attike, which includes the city of Athens, and the region of Makedonia in northern Greece, which includes the city of Thessaloniki.

The Greek Orthodox people who came to Greece as part of the “population exchange” brought with them many cultural traditions and, crucially, culinary traditions. They played an important role in popularizing döner kebap-style vertically-roasted meats in Greece. Over the course of the next few decades, the gyros as we know it today developed: a distinctly Greek sandwich made with vertically-roasted pork wrapped in pita bread, often served with tzatziki sauce, onions, and tomatoes.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a man cooking gyros meat in a Greek fast food restaurant

How the name γύρος became more common than the name ντονέρ

As I mentioned earlier, the word γύρος literally means “circle” or “rotation.” The name derives from the fact that the meats used in the sandwich are literally rotated in a circular motion on a vertical spit. γύρος, however, is not the only name for this kind of meat that is used in the Greek language; the dish has historically also been known as a ντονέρ (donér), which comes from the Turkish word döner. This name, however, fell out of favor in the Greek-speaking world over the course of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when relations between Greece and Turkey, which had never been good to begin with, rapidly deteriorated.

One major event in this process began in early September 1955, when the Turkish press began promoting a false report that Greek terrorists had bombed the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki. In reality, a bomb had been planted by a Turkish usher and university student named Oktay Engin, who had been acting under the orders of the Turkish consul M. Ali Balin himself. Both Engin and Balin were later arrested and confessed to their crimes.

On 6 September, a massive pogrom erupted in the city of İstanbul in which a violent mob of Turkish nationalists—many of whom had come to İstanbul from the countryside and didn’t actually live in the city—destroyed and looted over 5,300 properties owned by Greek residents, including homes, businesses, and Greek Orthodox churches. The mob brutally assaulted Greek residents themselves, raped Greek women, and forcibly circumcised Greek Othodox priests in the streets.

In addition to targeting ethnic Greeks, the mob also targeted ethnic Armenian and Jewish people. In total, the mob is thought to have killed at least thirty people, but the exact number is uncertain, since an accurate death toll was never taken. An article written by a journalist named Noel Barber published in The Daily Mail on 14 September 1955 describes the violence:

“The church of Yedikule was utterly smashed, and one priest was dragged from bed, the hair torn from his head and the beard literally torn from his chin. Another old Greek priest [Father Mantas] in a house belonging to the church and who was too ill to be moved was left in bed, and the house was set on fire and he was burned alive. At the church of Yeniköy, a lovely spot on the edge of the Bosporus, a priest of 75 was taken out into the street, stripped of every stitch of clothing, tied behind a car and dragged through the streets. They tried to tear the hair of another priest, but failing that, they scalped him, as they did many others.”

Many Turkish residents of İstanbul tried to protect their Greek, Armenian, and Jewish neighbors from the nationalist mob. Nonetheless, the pogrom caused enormous destruction—to such an extent that it has been described as “Turkey’s Kristallnacht.” The pogrom greatly accelerated the mass exodus of ethnic Greek people from İstanbul. In 1955, the number of Greek people in İstanbul was 65,108. By 1960, the number had fallen to 49,081. Today, the total Greek population in İstanbul is only around 2,000 people.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Turkish nationalist mob looting and destroying the property of Greek residents during the 1955 pogrom in İstanbul

ABOVE: Photograph of a street in İstanbul filled with wreckage after the infamous anti-Hellenic pogrom in 1955

Another series of events that greatly damaged Greek-Turkish relations occurred in 1974. On 15 July 1974, the Regime of the Colonels, an unpopular far-right military junta that had seized power in Greece with the support of the United States federal government, conducted a coup d’état in Kypros in which they ousted the legitimate, democratically-elected Kypriot president Archbishop Makarios III. The junta replaced Makarios III with an avowed Greek nationalist named Nikos Sampson, who supported Enosis (i.e., the idea that Kypros should be incorporated as part of the Greek nation-state).

Turkey immediately responded by invading Kypros on 20 July. Three days later, on 23 July, the Regime of the Colonels collapsed and, on 24 July, Konstantinos Karamanlis, a Greek center-right political leader who had been exiled by the junta, returned and was sworn in as interim prime minister, marking the beginning of metapolitefsi and Greece’s transition from a military dictatorship to a stable democracy.

The regime change in Greece led to a cease-fire, but, on 14 August, Turkey launched a second, much larger invasion of Kypros in which the Turkish military managed to seize control of the northeastern part of the island, amounting to a little more than a third of the island’s total land area. Approximately 80% of inhabitants of northern Kypros before the Turkish invasion were ethnic Greeks, but, in a blatant act of ethnic cleansing, the occupying Turkish forces violently expelled somewhere between 140,000 and 160,000 Greek Kypriots from the part of the island that they controlled.

The Turkish government began promoting an aggressive policy of settler-colonialism, pushing for ethnic Turks from mainland Turkey to settle in northern Kypros on lands that had been illegally stolen from native Greek Kypriots. In 1983, the Turkish-occupied northern part of Kypros declared itself the “Turkish Republic of Northern Kypros,” which remains a de facto state recognized only by the Republic of Turkey. All other countries and international organizations consider Northern Kypros illegally occupied Kypriot territory.

Naturally, in the midst of this international crisis, Greek people came to increasingly reject the Turkish name ντονέρ for the popular sandwich in favor of the etymologically Greek name γύρος.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the partition of Kypros. The southern part of the island is controlled by the legitimate government of the Republic of Kypros, while the northern part is illegally occupied by the Turkish military and operates as an unrecognized de jure state.

From Greek street stalls to mass production

Around the same time that the Kypriot crisis was unfolding, companies in the United States began to mass-produce ingredients for making gyros. While gyroi in Greece and Kypros are generally made from pieces of roasted pork, mass-produced gyros in the United States are usually made from cones of highly processed meat, manufactured from assorted ground-up beef and lamb trimmings, mixed with bread crumbs, water, oregano, and other seasonings.

According to an investigative article published in The New York Times on 14 July 2009, the first person in the United States to establish a plant for the mass-production of gyros cones was a Jewish former Marine and Cadillac salesman with the rather ironic name John Garlic, who reportedly set up an assembly line producing gyros cones in a rented space in a sausage plant in Chicago sometime before 1973. Supposedly, his wife saw a Greek restaurant owner demonstrate how to cook gyroi on television and suggested to her husband that he should find a way to mass-produce them.

Currently, the largest company in the United States producing gyros meats is Kronos Foods Incorporated, which was founded in Chicago in 1975 by a Greek man named Chris Tomaras. I honestly have no idea what he was thinking when he named his company, considering the fact that, in Greek mythology, the Titan Kronos is probably most famous for devouring his own children. Thus, “Kronos” seems like pretty much the worst name a person could possibly pick for a company that produces ambiguous cones of highly processed mystery meats. Somehow, though, despite the horrible name, the company is extremely successful.

ABOVE: Photograph from a 2009 article for The New York Times of Chris Tomaras, the founder of Kronos Foods Incorporated, which is the largest manufacturer of gyros meats in the United States, posing with a cart of uncooked gyros cones in a Kronos factory

The origins of the modern pronunciation controversy

In any case, as gyros meats began to be mass-produced and sold all over the United States, many Americans who didn’t know much about the Greek language began to look at the name gyros and assume that it was plural because it has the letter ⟨s⟩ on the end and, in English, ⟨s⟩ is often appended to the ends of words as a plural marker. Thus, these ignorant Americans invented the word gyro as a backformation, incorrectly assuming that it was the singular form of the word.

The controversy over how the word gyro should be pronounced arises from the discrepancy between how Greek words are normally transliterated into English and how they are actually pronounced in Greek. As I have mentioned, in Modern Greek, when the letter ⟨γ⟩ occurs before a front vowel, it becomes the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/, but, in English, when the letter ⟨g⟩ occurs before a front vowel, it often becomes the voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/, which is more typically represented in English by the letter ⟨j⟩.

Meanwhile, in Modern Greek, the letter ⟨υ⟩ on its own always makes the vowel sound /i/ like the letter ⟨i⟩ in the English word machine, but, in English, the letter ⟨y⟩ sometimes represents the /aɪ/ diphthong instead, including in English words that are themselves derived from the Greek word γῦρος, such as gyre, gyrate, and gyroscope. This creates a situation in which the instinctive English pronunciation based on the spelling of the word does not line up with how the word is pronounced in Greek.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve covered all the necessary background information, I suppose that I should return to the question that I originally started with: “How should the name of the Greek sandwich made with vertically-roasted meat be pronounced?” I personally always pronounce it /ˈʝiros/, but that’s just because I am, as I have already mentioned, a complete Greek language nerd; I can’t very well insist that this is the only correct pronunciation when it is a pronunciation that very few people in the English-speaking world ever use.

If you use the pronunciation /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ around me, I’ll probably wince, but I can’t say that it’s objectively “wrong,” since it’s really just an Americanized pronunciation. The word gyro itself is already Americanized due its lack of an ⟨s⟩ and there are plenty of other Greek words that have been given fully Americanized pronunciations that sound very little like their pronunciations in Greek.

In short, I suppose the answer is that you can pronounce the name however you feel like pronouncing it.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, you may also enjoyed my article I wrote in September 2020 about why the city of Constantinople is now known as İstanbul.