Here in central North Carolina, barbecue is shredded pork in a spicy vinegar sauce. How about where you are?

Here in eastern North Atlantic, a barbecue is an outdoor cooking device which cooks items on a wire rack by indirect (radiant) heat[1]. It's also the name of the popular summertime social activity where everyone goes round to someone's garden and cooks food on such a device. It's not the name of a foodstuff and it's rarely done commercially (except for Mongolian Barbecue and the like, which is a bit different).

Barbecue sauce is a well-known product, but I for one always assumed that it was called that because it tastes good on barbecued meat.

I also assumed that it was originally a US term, derived from "Bar-B-Q" as a cattle brand, but OED says it's derived from a Guianan Indian word that originally meant any raised wooden platform, whether for sleeping on or for lighting a fire underneath to cook. (It defines the verb "to barbecue" as "to roast or broil[2] an animal whole, e.g. to split a hog to the backbone, fill the belly with wine and stuffing, and cook it on a huge gridiron, basting with wine" which is considerably more ambitious than most of what's done under the name of barbecuing where I come from.)

Peter

[1] I hestitate to use the word "grill", because in England that refers to the part of an indoor cooking device (gas or electric) which cooks by radiant heat -- I think these are called "broilers" in the US. "Grilled" meat is prepared in a "grill", not a barbecue.

[2] To repeat, no-one in England actually calls this "broiling".