Ghee in Hindi is घी (ghī), a masculine noun meaning clarified butter. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary traces it to Sanskrit ghṛta, and the English word ghee is the same Hindi and Urdu word borrowed, with a first known use in English of 1665 according to Merriam-Webster. Below is the word in ten Indian languages, each with its script, its transliteration and the dictionary it was taken from.
At a glance
- McGregor's Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (1993) enters घी ghī with the origin ghr̥ta- in square brackets and the gloss "ghī, clarified butter".
- Merriam-Webster defines ghee as "a semifluid clarified butter made especially in India", from "Hindi & Urdu ghī, from Sanskrit ghṛta", with a first known use of 1665.
- The Tamil Lexicon of the University of Madras (1924–1936) gives நெய் ney nine senses, of which the first is "Ghee, clarified butter".
- Kittel's Kannada-English Dictionary has both ತುಪ್ಪ tuppa, "clarified butter, ghee", and ನೆಯ್ ney, whose second sense is ghee; the spelling neyyi appears there only as the Telugu cognate.
- FSSAI's sub-regulation 2.1.8 lists "Ghee" as the name of the food on a label and describes it as derived exclusively from milk or products obtained from milk.
What does ghee mean in Hindi?
In Hindi, ghee is घी, transliterated ghī. McGregor's Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary enters it as a masculine noun, glosses it "ghī, clarified butter", and gives its origin in square brackets as ghr̥ta-, the Sanskrit word. Caturvedi's Hindi-English dictionary, on the same University of Chicago site, gives the single English word "ghee".
People who type "ghee meaning in hindi" are asking one of two things: what the Hindi word for ghee is, or what ghī means in English. The Hindi word is घी, and every Hindi dictionary we opened renders it in English as clarified butter or ghee. Whether ghee and the clarified butter of a Western kitchen are the same product is a separate question, taken up in our article on whether ghee is the same as clarified butter.
The dictionaries also record the word in everyday idiom. McGregor lists घी-खिचड़ी for two people who are close friends. Caturvedi lists घी के चिराग़ जलाना, lighting lamps of ghee, for celebrating something long hoped for. Maya Singh's Panjabi Dictionary of 1895 has the Punjabi version of the first, gheu khichṛí hoṉá, and a second, gheu dá kuppá ruṛhṉá, "to flow a keg of ghee", for losing a great deal.
Where does the word ghee come from?
From Sanskrit घृत, ghṛta. Apte's Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary gives the neuter noun as "Ghee, clarified butter", with further senses "Butter" and "Water", and an adjective sense "Sprinkled" or "Illumined". The Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi dictionaries each trace their word to it, and Merriam-Webster traces the English word the same way.
Platts, in his 1884 Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English, gives the route in his square brackets: "[Prk. घियं or घिअं; S. घृतं]", that is, a Prakrit form alongside the Sanskrit one. Singh's Panjabi Dictionary puts it more bluntly: ghí is "Corrupted from the Sanskrit word Ghrit." Merriam-Webster's note on the English word reads "Hindi & Urdu ghī, from Sanskrit ghṛta". None of them dates the change from ghṛta to ghī, and we make no claim about it.
The Sanskrit word survives in the names of Ayurvedic medicated ghees, the ghritas. Our article on ghee in Ayurveda explains what a ghrita is and how far modern research has tested the tradition.
What is ghee called in other Indian languages?
Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali use a form of ghī. Marathi uses tūp and Kannada tuppa. Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu use ney or neyyi. Each word in the table below was taken from a dictionary on the University of Chicago's Digital Dictionaries of South Asia site, and the source column links to the entry we read.
| Language | Word | Transliteration | The dictionary's gloss | Dictionary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sanskrit | घृत | ghṛta | "Ghee, clarified butter" | Apte, The Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1957–1959) |
| Hindi | घी | ghī | "ghī, clarified butter" | McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (1993) |
| Urdu | گھی | ghī | "Clarified butter" | Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) |
| Punjabi | ਘੀ | ghí | "Clarified butter" | Singh, The Panjabi Dictionary (1895) |
| Bengali | ঘি | ghi | "clarified butter (of cow's or buffalo's milk), ghee" | Biswas, Samsad Bengali-English Dictionary (3rd ed., 2000) |
| Marathi | तूप | tūpa | "Clarified butter, ghee." | Molesworth, A Dictionary, Marathi and English (1857) |
| Kannada | ತುಪ್ಪ | tuppa | "clarified butter, ghee" | Kittel's Kannada-English Dictionary (rev. ed., 1968–1971) |
| Tamil | நெய் | ney | "Ghee, clarified butter" (first of nine senses) | Tamil Lexicon, University of Madras (1924–1936) |
| Malayalam | നെയി | ney | "Any unctuous substance, grease, fat, oil"; second sense, ghee | Gundert, A Malayalam and English Dictionary (1872) |
| Telugu | నెయ్యి | neyyi | "Butter which has been melted and clarified, ghee." | Brown, A Telugu-English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1903) |
The transliterations are the dictionaries' own, which is why they are not uniform: Molesworth writes tūpa with a final a, Singh writes ghí with an acute accent, and Gundert, in 1872, spells the Malayalam headword നെയി and notes the form നൈ beside it. Brown adds that Telugu neyyi is also spelled నేయి or నెయి, and gives ఘృతము as its synonym.
Gujarati is missing. The Chicago site lists no Gujarati dictionary we could search, and the Gujarati dictionary we tried to open refused the connection, so rather than copy a word from an unsourced list we have left it out. The rule for every row is the same: no entry we read, no row.
Why do word lists disagree about Kannada?
Because the dictionary has two words. Kittel's Kannada-English Dictionary enters ತುಪ್ಪ tuppa as "clarified butter, ghee", and also ನೆಯ್ ney, whose second sense is ghee. The spelling neyyi, which some brand blogs give for Kannada, is not a Kannada headword in Kittel at all; it appears inside the ನೆಯ್ entry only as the Telugu cognate.
So a list that says "Kannada: neyyi" has borrowed the Telugu spelling, and one that says "Kannada: tuppa" is on firmer ground. Ney in Kannada is not wrong either; Kittel records it. No dictionary we opened says which is more common, so we do not.
The same southern word turns up three times in the table, as Tamil ney, Malayalam ney and Telugu neyyi, and in all three it is wider than ghee. The Tamil Lexicon lists nine senses for நெய், in this order: ghee or clarified butter, butter, oil, civet, honey, blood, grease or fat, friendship or love, and the fourteenth nakṣatra. It marks the word's origin "perh. snēha", with the "perhaps" intact. Gundert's first sense for the Malayalam word is "any unctuous substance", and Brown says the Telugu word can mean any oily or greasy fluid. In these languages a bare ney is fixed to ghee by context; the dictionaries record the breadth, and we make no claim about which word, northern or southern, is older.
What does ghee mean in English?
In English, ghee is a loanword. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a semifluid clarified butter made especially in India", gives its origin as "Hindi & Urdu ghī, from Sanskrit ghṛta", and dates its first known use to 1665. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry sits behind a subscription we could not open, so Merriam-Webster is the dictionary we cite.
Clarified butter is the English gloss in nearly every row of the table above, from Molesworth in 1857 to Biswas in 2000. Platts, writing in 1884, goes further than a gloss: his entry describes ghī as made by simmering butter and straining it, and notes its use both in cooking and in religious observance. That description is a nineteenth-century dictionary's, not a food standard's; the standard is below.
What is ghee legally called in India?
On a label in India the name of the food is "Ghee", in any state. FSSAI's sub-regulation 2.1.8, the Standard for Milk Fat Products, gives three permitted names in its labelling clause: "Milk fat or Butter Oil", "Anhydrous Milk fat or Anhydrous Butter Oil", and "Ghee". A regional word may appear on the pack; the legal name is English.
The same standard describes what the word covers. Its five milk fat products are, in its words, "fatty products derived exclusively from milk or products obtained from milk, or both, by means of processes which result in almost total removal of water and milk solids-not-fat". It then sets ghee apart from the other four in one sentence: "Ghee has especially developed flavour and physical structure as a result of its method of manufacturing." The raw material, it adds, "shall be free from added flavour, colour or preservative". The version we read is FSSAI's consolidated Chapter 2.1 dated 1 September 2023.
Words such as desi, pure or shuddh on a jar are not part of that legal name. What desi means on a label, and why vanaspati is the thing the word is meant to rule out, is the subject of our article on what desi ghee means.
Whichever word you use at home, ghī, tūp, tuppa or ney, the jar is the same product, and the batch code tells you more about it than the vocabulary does. Ours is Himdhara's A2 bilona ghee, set from Badri cow milk into curd and churned on a wooden bilona in the Uttarakhand hills; every jar carries a batch code, and its laboratory report is published before the batch ships.
The short version
Ghee in Hindi is घी, ghī, and the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary traces it to Sanskrit ghṛta, which Apte glosses "Ghee, clarified butter". Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali use forms of the same word; Marathi has tūp, Kannada tuppa, and Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu have ney or neyyi, a word their dictionaries show is wider than ghee. English borrowed ghee from Hindi and Urdu; Merriam-Webster dates its first known use to 1665. On an Indian label the legal name is "Ghee", under FSSAI's sub-regulation 2.1.8. Every word above comes from a dictionary we opened; Gujarati is missing because we could not open one.
Sources
Further reading behind the figures above. Himdhara's own numbers — yields, batch results — come from our production records and the batch reports on the lab reports page.
- McGregor, R. S. (1993). घी ghī. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, Oxford University Press; Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago.
- Platts, John T. (1884). گھی घी ghī. A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English, W. H. Allen; Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago.
- Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago. Dictionaries (Apte, Tamil Lexicon, Brown, Kittel, Gundert, Molesworth, Biswas and Singh; each entry is linked from the table above). dsal.uchicago.edu.
- Merriam-Webster. Ghee. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.
- Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (2023). Chapter 2.1: Dairy Products and Analogues (2.1.8, Standard for Milk Fat Products). Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011.