barbecue

noun

1. 1

   A fireplace or pit for grilling food, typically used outdoors and traditionally employing hot charcoal as the heating medium.

   We cooked our food on the barbecue.

2. 2

   A meal or event highlighted by food cooked in such an apparatus.

   We're having a barbecue on Saturday, and you're invited.

   The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities.

3. 3

   Meat, especially pork or beef, which has been cooked in such an apparatus (i.e. smoked over indirect heat from high-smoke fuels) and then chopped up or shredded.

   She ordered a plate of barbecue with a side of slaw.

4. 4

   datedA hog, ox, or other large animal roasted or broiled whole for a feast.

5. 5

   A floor on which coffee beans are sun-dried.

   Drying the coffee beans took place in a barbecue, basically a large, flat platform, where the pulped coffee beans could be laid out and turned as they dried. Barbecues were often walled around and raised above ground level.

6. 6

   obsoleteA framework of sticks.

   1705, William Dampier, Voyages and Descriptions, Volume 2, London: James Knapton, “A Supplement of the Voyage Round the World,” Chapter 5, p. 90, We found no Houses of Entertainment on the Road, yet at every Village we came we got Houseroom, and a Barbacue of split Bambooes to sleep on.

verb

1. 1

   To cook food on a barbecue; to smoke food over indirect heat from high-smoke fuels.

2. 2

   To grill.

3. 3

   slangTo kill or destroy using high heat or fire; to cook; to burn.

   Then he picked up a flamethrower and he barbecued Blitzen And he took a big bite and said, "It tastes just like chicken"

Forms

plural

barbecues

past tense

barbecued

past participle

barbecued

present participle

barbecuing, barbecueing

third person singular

barbecues