The first mention of the word in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1936. The English word is borrowed from Modern Greek (, "bread, cake, pie, pitta"), in turn from Byzantine Greek (attested in 1108), possibly from Ancient Greek () or (, both "pitch/resin") for the gloss, or from (, "fermented pastry"), which may have passed to Latin as cf. pizza. In Levantine Arabic it evolved into , (since Old Arabic /p/ evolved into /f/). Other hypotheses trace the word back to the Classical Hebrew word (, lit. "a morsel of bread"). It is spelled like the Aramaic (), from which it was received into Byzantine Greek (see above). Hypotheses also exist for Germanic or Illyrian intermediaries.