Pitta Bread...Yummy...Yummy...

"Pita" is "bread" in Aramaic. When Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to Palestine in the 19th century, they needed a different word in Hebrew for the Arabic bread, simply called "bread" ("khubz") by the local people. The Hebrew word for bread could not be used, as it denoted a different type, so the Aramaic word was adopted. Today, even speakers of Arabic in Israel refer to the pita as "bita" rather than "khubz", as was customary in the Arab community. Israelis exported the pita to Western countries, together with Falafel and other types of Arabic food since the 1950s. This coincides with the linguistic evidence: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first mention of the word in English was in 1951, with references to Balkan, Greek, and especially Arab cuisine in the next three decades. The American Heritage Dictionary traces the word's origin to modern Greek for "pie," "cake," or "bread";. In Serbian it means pie in general. Another possible etymology is from a Romanian archaic word for bread, pită. An alternative etymology traces the word to a cognate for pine pitch, which forms flat layers that may resemble pita bread, which in turn may share an etymological origin with pizza (Italian for "pie"). The word spread to Southern Italy as the name of a thin bread. In Northern Italian dialects pita became pizza, now known primarily as the bearer of savoury toppings but essentially still a flat bread. Indeed in some parts of southern Italy, there are pastries called Pita, which are filled with spicy fruit and nuts.