Norm Cox drew the hamburger menu for the Xerox Star in 1981. I’m revisiting nav patterns for a mobile app and can’t pin down when ‘kebab’ (vertical dots) and ‘meatballs’ (horizontal dots) became the common names — was that Android 3.0/Material-era, or earlier?
Pretty sure the food names are community slang from the mid‑2010s: Material (2014) popularized the vertical dots but the docs call it “overflow,” not “kebab” or “meatballs.” For a primary source, see Google’s spec: Material Design. Did you maybe hear “meatballs” via Windows/Office, where it’s usually just “More/ellipsis” and not a full deli special?
I first saw the vertical dots as Android’s Action Overflow in Honeycomb (2011), and the kebab/meatballs nicknames didn’t really stick in my team until about 2015 via blogs/Stack Overflow; @nicadam’s right that Material called it overflow, not deli. My tip: in specs I use platform terms — Overflow on Android, Ellipsis on iOS (SF Symbols) — and save the food names for chatter so devs don’t miswire behaviors; does that match how you’re labeling it?
Earliest three‑dot I remember is Windows Phone’s app bar ellipsis (2010), which likely set the “more” association before Android spread it. Material labeled them more_vert/more_horiz rather than the nicknames, e.g. https://fonts.google.com/icons?selected=Material+Icons:more_vert. If you’re documenting, I’d stick with “ellipsis” or “overflow” and keep the snack names for chatter — are you naming components or writing a style guide?
If you’re revisiting mobile nav, one thing that’s saved me bikeshedding: in specs I name the three-dot icons ‘vertical ellipsis (U+22EE)’ and ‘horizontal ellipsis (U+2026)’ so design/dev across iOS (‘Ellipsis’ in HIG) and Android (‘Overflow’) stay aligned. Small caveat: on iOS it often signifies a ‘More’ action rather than a menu opener, so document the behavior alongside the label.
My hunch is the food nicknames bubbled up from the community around 2013–2015, not from platform docs. “Overflow” (Google) and “ellipsis” (Apple/SF Symbols) are the official labels; if you want a paper trail, try Wayback on Material guidelines and a year‑filtered search like Human verification - Stack Overflow. For your app, I’d spec the icons as Overflow with orientation variants and leave the kebabs for lunch.