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Pita or pitta (British English) is a family of yeast-leavened round flatbreads baked from wheat flour, common in the Mediterranean, Levant, and neighboring areas. It includes the widely known version with an interior pocket, also known as Arabic bread (Arabic: خبز عربي; khubz ʿArabī). In the United Kingdom, Greek bread is used for pocket versions such as the Greek pita, and are used for barbecues as a souvlaki wrap. The Western name pita may sometimes be used to refer to various other types of flatbreads that have different names in their local languages, such as numerous styles of Arab khubz (bread). 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 πίτα (píta, "bread, cake, pie"), in turn from Byzantine Greek (attested in 1108), possibly from Ancient Greek πίττα (pítta) or πίσσα (píssa), both "pitch/resin" for the gloss, or from πικτή (piktḗ, "fermented pastry"), which may have passed to Latin as picta cf. pizza. In Levantine Arabic it evolved into fatteh, (since Old Arabic /p/ evolved into /f/). Other hypotheses trace the word back to the Classical Hebrew word פת (patt, lit. "a morsel of bread"). It is spelled like the Aramaic פיתא (pittā), from which it was received into Byzantine Greek (see above). Hypotheses also exist for Germanic or Illyrian intermediaries.

Source: Wikipedia