pilaf n.

oriental dish of rice boiled with meat, 1610s, pilau (which remains the commoner form in British English), from Turkish pilav, from Persian pilaw. The form perhaps has been influenced by Modern Greek pilafi, which is from the Turkish word, but Ayto ("Diner's Dictionary") writes that from the beginning "the spelling of the word was positively anarchic" and that pilaf "represents a modern Turkish pronunciation."