naan

Naan is a leavened, oven-baked (usually using a tandoor) or tawa-fried flatbread, which is found in the cuisines mainly of Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Caribbean. Etymology The earliest appearance of "naan" in English is from 1803 in a travelogue of William Tooke. The Persian word nān 'bread' is attested in Middle Persian as n'n 'bread, food', which is of Iranian origin, and is a cognate with Parthian ngn, Kurdish nan, Balochi nagan, Sogdian nγn-, and Pashto nəγan 'bread'. Naan may have derived from bread baked on hot pebbles in ancient Persia. The form naan has a widespread distribution, having been borrowed in a range of languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent and also Central Asia where it usually refers to a kind of flatbread (tandyr nan). The spelling naan has been recorded as being first attested in 1979, but dates back at least to 1975, and has since become the normal English spelling. Many English speakers refer to it as "naan bread" which is a common mistake, as simply "naan" already means "bread".