The Greek dish known as souvlaki, made by grilling pieces of lamb on a skewer, takes its name from a shoemaker’s tool, the awl, a pointed rod used to poke holes into leather. The Latin name for this tool—subula, which derives from the older suere, meaning to sew—was adopted by Greek as soublion. In Modern Greek, soublion became soubla and was combined with a diminutive suffix to form soublaki, meaning small awl, a kind of kitchen skewer used to grill meat. In time, the name of the implement was transferred to the grilled meat itself, which is the sense the word possessed when English adopted it as souvlaki in the middle of the twentieth century. Another word that developed from the same Latin source as souvlaki is suture, a stitch used to sew together the edges of a wound.