Barbecue or barbeque (often shortened to BBQ worldwide; barbie or barby in Australia and New Zealand) is a term used with significant regional and national variations to describe various cooking methods that employ live fire and smoke to cook food. The term is also generally applied to the devices associated with those methods, the broader cuisines that these methods produce, and the meals or gatherings at which this style of food is cooked and served. The cooking methods associated with barbecuing vary significantly.

The various regional variations of barbecue can be broadly categorized into those methods which use direct and those which use indirect heating. Indirect barbecues are associated with US cuisine, in which meat is heated by roasting or smoking over wood or charcoal. These methods of barbecue involve cooking using smoke at low temperatures with long cooking times, for several hours. Elsewhere, barbecuing more commonly refers to the more direct application of heat, grilling of food over hot coals or a gas fire. This technique is usually done over direct, dry heat or a hot fire for a few minutes. Within these broader categorizations are further national and regional differences.

The English word barbecue and its cognates in other languages come from the Spanish word barbacoa, which has its origin in an indigenous American word. Etymologists believe this to be derived from barabicu found in the language of the Arawak people of the Caribbean and the Timucua people of Florida; it has entered some European languages in the form of barbacoa. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the word to Hispaniola and translates it as a "framework of sticks set upon posts".

A popular folk etymology of the word says that the term is derived from the French barbe à queue ("from beard to tail") signifying a whole animal being roasted on a spit, but this origin for the word is not supported by academic etymology.

The term itself has two spellings in English: "barbecue" and "barbeque". While in most countries the spelling "barbecue" is used, the spelling "barbeque" is occasionally used in Australia, New Zealand, and the US.

Spanish explorer Gonzalo Fernández De Oviedo y Valdés was the first to use the word barbecoa in print in Spain in 1526 in the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (2nd Edition) of the Real Academia Española. After Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, the Spaniards apparently found Taíno roasting meat over a grill consisting of a wooden framework resting on sticks above a fire. This framework was also used to store food above ground and for sleeping. The flames and smoke rose and enveloped the meat, giving it a certain flavor. Spaniards called the framework a barbacoa.

Another form of barbacoa involves digging a hole in the ground, burning logs in it and placing stones in it to absorb and retain heat. Large cuts of meat, often wrapped in leaves, often a whole goat or lamb, are placed above a pot so the juices can be used to make a broth. It is then covered with maguey leaves and coal, and set alight. The cooking process takes a few hours. Olaudah Equiano, an African abolitionist, described this method of roasting alligators among the "Mosquito people" (Miskito people) on his journeys to Cabo Gracias a Dios on the Mosquito Coast, in his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Linguists have suggested the word was loaned successively into Spanish, then Portuguese, French, and English. In the form barbacado, the word was used in English in 1648 by the supposed Beauchamp Plantagenet in the tract A description of the province of New Albion: "the Indians in stead of salt doe barbecado or dry and smoak fish".