In a Word: Why There’s No Ham in Hamburger

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

A White Castle that opened in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921 is widely considered to be the very first fast food restaurant in the world, selling their small, uniform hamburgers. The fast food industry has flourished and diversified since then, but it’s fair to say that it all began with hamburgers.

That word hamburger has an interesting history and is a wonderful example of how unexpectedly — and how quickly — a word can evolve and change in the English language.

The first Hamburger, of course, simply meant “from Hamburg, Germany.” Burg is German for “fort, castle.” The first part of the place name is either from Old High German hamma, which was literally “the back of the knee” but, by extension, “bend, angle,” or Middle High German hamme “enclosed pastureland, meadow.” To that end, a castle built on a meadow near a bend in the Elbe River in the 8th or 9th century is one of the oldest known settlements in the Hamburg area.

In the late 1800s, during a period of heavy German immigration, an item called Hamburger steak began appearing on American menus. It’s what you probably think: Beef that has been ground up and served as an entrée. This was considered to be typical of German cuisine at the time; no direct link specifically to Hamburg has been uncovered, however.

At some point, someone — likely tired of having their consumption slowed by knife and fork — realized that they could go utensil-free by nesting their Hamburger steak between slices of bread. This caught on and was call a Hamburger sandwich, or just a hamburger for short.

The modern hamburger — with its standard condiments — began to take shape in the early 20th century. The flood of German immigrants began to slow at this time as well, and little by little, the hamburger’s connection to Hamburg began to fade in the minds of Americans.

Seeing that there was ham in the word hamburger but not pork products in the sandwich, burger became a common shortening of the word. Anti-German sentiment during World War I probably gave a big boost to this shortening as well. (Indeed, in some places in the United States, the name hamburger was mistakenly replaced with Salisbury steak, which had been invented in 1885 and involved pounding a steak flat, rather than grinding it up, because it was believed to aid digestion.) Burger has long since embedded itself in the English lexicon, completely divorced from German geography.

Since Burg is German for “fort, castle,” you might say that the modern burger breaks down to “from a castle” — fitting considering that the first fast food burgers came from a restaurant called White Castle.

Burger has also become a combining form, giving us cheeseburgers and more modern fare like turkeyburgers and veggieburgers. The burger field has become so wide and varied that backformations like steakburger and beefburger have been coined to make it clear what type of meat you can expect to bite into, despite the fact that hamburger historically already indicates ground beef.