Curry is a dish with a sauce or gravy seasoned with spices, mainly derived from the interchange of Indian cuisine with European taste in food, starting with the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch and British, and then thoroughly internationalised. Many dishes that would be described as curries in English are found in the native cuisines of countries in Southeast Asia and East Asia. The English word is derived indirectly from some combination of Dravidian words.

A first step in the creation of curry was the arrival in India of spicy hot chili peppers, along with other ingredients such as tomatoes and potatoes, part of the Columbian exchange of plants between the Old World and the New World. During the British Raj, Anglo-Indian cuisine developed, leading to Hannah Glasse's 18th century recipe for "currey the India way" in England. Curry was then spread in the 19th century by indentured Indian sugar workers to the Caribbean, and by British traders to Japan. Further exchanges around the world made curry a fully international dish.

Many types of curry exist in different countries. In Southeast Asia, curry often contains a spice paste and coconut milk. In India, the spices are fried in oil or ghee to create a paste; this may be combined with a water-based broth, or sometimes with milk or coconut milk. In China and Korea, curries are based on a commercial curry powder. Curry restaurants outside their native countries often adapt their cuisine to suit local tastes; for instance, Thai restaurants in the West sell red, yellow, and green curries with chili peppers of those colours, often combined with additional spices of the same colours. In Britain, curry has become a national dish, with some types adopted from India, others modified or wholly invented, as with chicken tikka masala, created by British Bangladeshi restaurants in the 20th century.

The word curry is derived from Dravidian kari in languages such as Middle Tamil. The Oxford Dictionaries suggest an origin specifically from Tamil. Other Dravidian languages, namely Malayalam (കറി kari, "hot condiments; meats, vegetables"), Middle Kannada, Kodava, and Telugu have similar words.

Kaṟi is described in a 17th-century Portuguese cookbook, based on trade with Tamil merchants along the Coromandel Coast of southeast India, becoming known as a "spice blend ... called kari podi or curry powder". The first appearance in its anglicised form (spelt currey) was in Hannah Glasse's 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

The term "curry" is not derived from the name of the curry tree, although some curries do include curry leaves among many other spices. The cookery writer Pat Chapman noted the similarity of the words Karahi or Kadai, an Indian cooking dish shaped like a wok, without giving evidence. "Curry" is not related to the word cury in The Forme of Cury, a 1390s English cookbook; that term comes from the Middle French word cuire, meaning 'to cook'.

Around 5000 BCE, seafaring merchants from Austronesian communities began trading spices across the ocean. They sailed between South Asia and East Asia, especially the ports along southeastern India and Sri Lanka, creating some of the world's earliest maritime trade networks. Archaeological discoveries at Mohenjo-daro show that people were using mortar and pestle to grind spices as early as 2600 BCE. They pounded mustard, fennel, cumin, and tamarind pods to create flavourings for their food. Black pepper is native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia and has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE. The three basic ingredients of the spicy stew were ginger, garlic, and turmeric. Using starch grain analysis, archaeologists identified the residue of these spices in both skeletons and pottery shards from excavations in India, finding that turmeric and ginger were present. Sauces in India before Columbus could contain black pepper or long pepper to provide a little heat, but not chili, so they were not spicy hot by modern standards.

The establishment of the Mughal Empire, in the early 16th century, influenced some curries, especially in the north. Another influence was the establishment of the Portuguese trading centre in Goa in 1510, resulting in the introduction of chili peppers, tomatoes and potatoes to India from the Americas, as a byproduct of the Columbian Exchange. Food culture scholar Lizzie Collingham suggests that the Portuguese in Goa (in West India) heard and adopted words adopted into a local language from the Dravidian words from South India, becoming caril or carree as transcribed by British travellers of the time. This eventually led to the modern meaning of "curry" as a dish, often spiced, in a sauce or gravy. In 1598, an English translation of a Dutch book about travel in the East Indies mentioned a "somewhat sour" broth called Carriel, eaten with rice. The later Dutch word karie was used in the Dutch East Indies from the 19th century; many Indians had by then migrated to Southeast Asia.