Gyros - The Name Debate is an explainer entry rather than a recipe: it exists to settle what the word actually means and how it is said, because both are routinely mangled outside Greece. The core fact is the pronunciation. In Greek it is YEE-ros, not JY-ro; the Anglicized JY-ro heard in much of the diaspora is a reading that the Greek word does not support. The name comes from the verb γυρίζω, gyrízo, meaning to turn, and it describes the cooking method directly: meat stacked on a vertical spit that turns against a heat source. The word names the mechanism, not the meat, the bread, or the sauce.
The second half of the debate is what gyros is and is not relative to its neighbors. The construction is a close cousin of Turkish döner and Arabic shawarma, all three built on the same vertical-spit principle, and the honest framing is that they share a technique while differing in the particulars. What marks the Greek version is its seasoning and its accompaniments rather than the spit itself: the marinade leans Greek, and the standard build folds the shaved meat into a soft oiled pita with tomato, raw onion, tzatziki, and fries. Calling it a Greek döner is technically defensible on method and misleading on character, which is the whole point of keeping the terms straight. The single shaved cone is gyros; the word should not be stretched to cover skewered grilled meat, which is a separate preparation under a separate name.
The debate shifts by where you are standing, and that regional layer is its own subject. The way Athens and Thessaloniki use gyros and souvlaki differently is a real and specific source of confusion that deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. For this entry the constant is narrow and worth holding onto: gyros means the turning spit, it is pronounced YEE-ros, and its Greekness lives in the seasoning and the pita-and-tzatziki assembly rather than in the rotisserie it shares with its cousins.