A hamburger with bacon, lettuce, and slices of tomato, served with french fries and a beer

         A hamburger with bacon, lettuce, and slices of tomato, served with french fries and a beer

A hamburger, or simply a burger, is a dish consisting of fillings—usually a patty of ground meat, typically beef—placed inside a sliced bun or bread roll. The patties are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon, or chilis with condiments such as ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish or a "special sauce", often a variation of Thousand Island dressing, and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger patty topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger.^[1] Under some definitions, and in some cultures, a burger is considered a sandwich.

Hamburgers are typically associated with fast-food restaurants and diners but are also sold at various other restaurants, including more expensive high-end establishments. There are many international and regional variations of hamburgers. Some of the largest multinational fast-food chains feature burgers as one of their core products: McDonald's Big Mac and Burger King's Whopper have become global icons of American culture.

Etymology and terminology

The term hamburger originally derives from Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany; however, there is no specific connection between the dish and the city.^[4]

By linguistic rebracketing, the term "burger" eventually became a self-standing word that is associated with many different types of sandwiches that are similar to a hamburger, but contain different meats such as buffalo in the buffalo burger, venison, kangaroo, chicken, turkey, elk, lamb or fish such as salmon in the salmon burger, and even with meatless sandwiches as is the case of the veggie burger.

The term burger can also be applied to a meat patty on its own. Since the term hamburger usually implies beef, for clarity burger may be prefixed with the type of meat or meat substitute used, as in beef burger, turkey burger, bison burger, or portobello burger. In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a piece of chicken breast in a bun is a chicken burger. Americans would call this a chicken sandwich because the meat is not ground, whereas in other countries, anything with a bun is considered a burger and a sandwich has sliced bread