Names and Etymology
Dolma is a verbal noun of the Turkish verb dolmak, 'to be stuffed', and means 'stuffed (thing)'. Dolma is a stuffed vegetable, that is, a vegetable that is hollowed out and filled with stuffing. This applies to courgette, tomato, pepper, eggplant, and the like; stuffed mackerel, squid, and mussel are also called dolma. Dishes involving wrapping leaves such as vine leaves or cabbage leaves around a filling are called sarma, though in many languages the distinction is usually not made. Sarma is derived from the Turkish verb sarmak which means 'to wrap'. Other variants like "kiraz yaprağı sarma" (stuffed cherry leaves) do not have this confusion. On the other hand, the confusion is always in using the word "dolma" for "sarma", never the other way around, maybe because there are more varieties of dolma and it is the generally known word.
Dolma cooked with olive oil without minced meat is sometimes called yalancı dolma, "yalancı" literally meaning 'liar' (which in this case means 'false' or 'fake') in Turkish. It is 'fake' because it does not contain meat.
In some countries, the usual name for the dish is a borrowing of dolma or yaprak (meaning 'leaf' in Turkish), in others it is a calque, and sometimes the two coexist with distinct meanings: Albanian: japrak; Arabic: محشي maḥshi ('stuffed'), محشي ورق عنب (maḥshī waraq 'inab, 'stuffed grape leaf'); Persian: دلمه dolma; Greek: ντολμάς dolmas (for the leaf-wrapped kind) and γεμιστά yemista 'stuffed'; Kurdish: dolma (دۆلمە), yaprakh (یاپراخ). In Aleppo, the word يبرق yabraq refers to stuffed vine leaves, while محشي maḥshī refers to stuffed cabbage leaves and stuffed vegetables.
Some Armenian linguists have proposed that dolma, which is pronounced tolma in Armenia, is borrowed from the Urartian word for grape vine, toli, which would make dolma a derivative of tolma which in turn comes from toli. This proposal has not been adopted by other linguists.
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