Is a Hamburger a Sandwich?

The students in my class were arguing a question of semantics: is a hamburger a sandwich?

One student noted that the menu designer at the restaurant where she worked couldn’t decide if a chicken burger should be listed under Hamburgers or Sandwiches. Another student invoked the USDA’s definition of a sandwich as “meat or poultry between two slices of bread.” The discussion in class got surprisingly heated, with raised voices and an expletive hurled. People feel strongly about meanings and their burgers.

Not long afterward, two friends were arguing a point of usage on Facebook. One asserted that “Words have a meaning – which facilitates clear communication among participants in a language – or they do not.” The other countered that “Words don’t have a meaning. Most words communicate many different things.” And she gave the example of the polysemy of the word “sandwich.”

Words do communicate many different things and their meanings shift over time. The two discussions made me hungry to address the semantics of words like “sandwich” and “hamburger,” which turn out to be a particularly good test kitchen in which to explore the evolution of words.

The sandwich gets its name from the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu.

“Sandwich,” of course, is an eponym from the title of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu (1718–1792). It refers to “an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, or other fillings between them, eaten as a light meal.”  It can also mean “something that is constructed like or has the form of a sandwich” (according to the Oxford Living Dictionary). The first definition gets extended a bit in usages like “open-faced sandwich,” where the filling is not actually between the bread, and in “club sandwich,” which involves more than two pieces of bread.  The second meaning of “sandwich” gets extended metaphorically in “sandwich generation” and in the slang expression, “a knuckle sandwich.”

The term 'hamburger' came from German immigrants to the United States.

Food historians trace the term “hamburger” to the German immigration of the nineteenth century, and according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Delmonico’s restaurant in New York offered a Hamburg Steak as early as 1834. Cookbooks soon featured the Beefsteak à la Hamburg and the Salisbury Steak, pioneered by the Civil War physician, James H. Salisbury.

Hamburgers as we think of them today became popular in the early twentieth...

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