shish kebabs

Noun

shish kebab (countable and uncountable, plural shish kebabs)

1. A dish made of small pieces of meat, with or without vegetables, which are skewered on a wooden or metal stick and roasted in an oven or over an open fire.
   • “That’s terrible,” Mel said. “That’s a terrible thing, Nicky. I guess they’d just lay there and wait until somebody came along and made a shish kebab out of them.”1981, Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, New York: Knopf, →ISBN, page 149
2. (countable) A crystal structure consisting of a central spine (the shish) and disks or lumps growing out from it (the kebab).
   • The fibrillar crystals, which are known as shish-kebabs, develop when a 0.5% solution of polyethylene in xylene is cooled off at the rate of 1°C per hour with stirring…1968, A. J. Pennings, Liquid-Crystal Phase Separation in Polymer Solutions, from Characterization of Macromolecular Structure, proceedings of a conference April 5–7, 1967, Warrenton, Virginia, page...