Agarbatti Meaning in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Other Languages

Last updated: 4 November 2026 · By Acharya Alok Pandit, Divine Hindu, Jayanagar 3rd Block East, Bengaluru 560011 · ~16 min read

What is agarbatti in English?

Agarbatti in English is an incense stick. Rekhta's Urdu–Hindi dictionary glosses it as a "thin stick covered with incense paste, joss stick, incense stick". The Alar Kannada–English dictionary gives the same sense: a thin stick burned to get fragrant fumes, especially in religious rites.

So there are three correct English renderings, and they are not quite the same thing:

• Incense stick is the plain, everyday translation. Use it on a label, in a recipe for puja samagri or in a search box.
• Joss stick is an older English name that dictionaries still list. It means the same object.
• Incense on its own is the fragrant material, or the smoke, rather than the stick. "Light the incense" works; "a packet of incense" usually means sticks, cones or resin.

In Indian English, many people simply say "agarbatti" or "agarbathi", and both spellings appear on packs. The second spelling, with "-thi", is the one used in the registered name "Mysore Agarbathi".

An agarbatti has three parts: a bamboo stick, a base paste of charcoal dust or wood powder held together with jigat (the powdered bark of Litsea glutinosa), and the fragrance, either rolled on as a masala powder or added later as liquid perfume. How those parts are made and rolled is a story of its own; our guide to how agarbatti is made in India walks through it.

Agarbatti meaning in Indian languages: the full table

The table below gives the word for agarbatti in each major Indian language, with the script, a Roman transliteration, what the parts of the word mean and where we checked it. Rows marked "Roman only" are those where we could confirm the word in just one source.

Two patterns stand out. North and west India mostly keep agar or ūd at the front of the word. South India adds its own words for "stick" and "wick", and Malayalam names the stick after sandal rather than agarwood.

Why is it called agarbatti? The etymology of agar + batti

Agarbatti is called agarbatti because it joins agar, the fragrant resin-filled wood of Aquilaria trees, with batti, a stick or wick. Wikipedia's article on incense in India traces batti to Sanskrit varti, "stick", citing standard dictionaries of Indian languages.

What does agar mean?

Agar is agarwood, also called aloeswood or oud. It is resin-filled heartwood that forms after an Aquilaria tree is wounded and infected, according to a 2023 TRAFFIC fact sheet. Assam is known as India's agarwood capital. All Aquilaria species have been listed under CITES Appendix II since January 2005, so trade in the wood is regulated.

Linguists trace agar to Tamil akil. Burrow and Emeneau's Dravidian Etymological Dictionary lists Tamil akil and Malayalam akil for eagle-wood. R. L. Turner's Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages marks Sanskrit aguru or agaru as borrowed from Dravidian.

Turner's entry also shows how widely the word travelled. It lists Hindi agar, Gujarati agar and agru, Marathi agar, Bengali and Assamese agaru and Odia agarū. The historian David Shulman notes that the Hebrew Bible's ahalim was probably borrowed directly from Tamil akil.

Not every dictionary agrees. Rekhta labels the whole word "Origin: Sanskrit". We give both readings: the compound is Indian on either view, and the scholarly dictionaries lean Dravidian for agar.

What does batti mean?

Batti means a wick or a stick, the same word used for a lamp wick. Molesworth's nineteenth-century Marathi–English dictionary defines अगरबत्ती as "a wick covered over with a composition of aloe-wood-scrapings, camphor" and other fragrant things. That is one of the clearest old records of what the name meant: agarwood rolled onto a wick.

Does modern agarbatti contain agarwood?

The name does not promise agarwood. A modern stick may carry any fragrance, from sandalwood to rose to a musk accord, either rolled on as masala or dipped in perfume. Read the label for the fragrance, not the word "agarbatti". Our guide to types of agarbatti explains masala, dipped, charcoal and bambooless sticks.

Some websites say agarbatti means "aroma plus light" or "scent plus wound". The dictionaries we checked do not support either reading.

Ūdbatti, ūdubatti, ūdhupatti: the ūd family of names

The second great family of names starts with ūd: Hindi ऊदबत्ती, Marathi उदबत्ती, Kannada ಊದುಬತ್ತಿ and Tamil ஊதுவத்தி all belong to it.

The Madras University Tamil Lexicon derives ūtuvatti from Urdu ūd, meaning aloeswood or agarwood, plus the word for wick. If that is right, agarbatti and ūdbatti say exactly the same thing in two vocabularies: a stick of agarwood. Agar came through the Indian languages; ūd came through Arabic and Persian, where it gave us the perfume word "oud".

There is a popular second reading. In Tamil and Kannada, ūdu also means "to blow", and many people explain ūdubatti as a stick that "blows" fragrance. Wikipedia's article on Mysore Agarbathi glosses the old Bengaluru word "oodabathies" as "blowing fumes". We call the "blow" reading popular, and the ūd reading the one the Tamil Lexicon gives.

Old dictionaries were loose about which resin a name meant. Molesworth glosses Marathi ūdakāḍī as "a stick smeared over with frankincense, a pastil". The same looseness surrounds loban and sambrani today, as our guide to sambrani, dhoop, loban and camphor explains.

What is dhupa? The Sanskrit word for incense

Dhūpa (धूप) is the Sanskrit word for incense and fumigation, and also for the act of offering incense in worship. Both Wikipedia's article on dhupa and the Wisdom Library's Sanskrit glossaries give these senses.

In the five-step puja, panchopachara, dhupa comes third: gandha (fragrant paste), pushpa (flowers), dhupa, dipa (lamp) and naivedya (food). Dhupa names the offering, whatever form the incense takes: stick, cone, resin or powder. Our guide to how to light agarbatti in puja covers where dhupa sits in the longer sixteen-step puja.

Ancient and medieval texts call stick incense dhūpavarti, "incense wick", according to James McHugh's study Sandalwood and Carrion (OUP, 2012), as cited by Wikipedia. That early form had no bamboo core. The bamboo-core stick is an Indian development of more recent date; Wikipedia places it at the end of the nineteenth century.

Many Indian languages still use the Sanskrit root. Bengali ধূপ, Odia dhūpa and Hindi धूपबत्ती all come from it, and so does the everyday word "dhoop".

Is agarbatti the same as incense, dhoop and sambrani?

Agarbatti is one kind of incense: incense on a bamboo core. Dhoop is incense without a core, sold as a solid stick, cone or paste. A government project profile from the Development Commissioner (MSME) calls agarbatti "a development of Dhup".

For the full taxonomy, with burn times, smoke and ash for each kind, see our guide to masala, charcoal, dhoop, bambooless and cone agarbatti. For a stick whose base paste has no charcoal, see what charcoal-free agarbatti means.

How do you say agarbatti in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam?

In the four big South Indian languages, the everyday words are ūdhupatti or agarpatti in Tamil, agarubatti in Telugu, ūdubatti in Kannada and chandanathiri in Malayalam.

Agarbatti in Tamil

Tamil uses ஊதுபத்தி (ūdhupatti), ஊதுவத்தி (ūtuvatti) and அகர்பத்தி (agarpatti). The -patti and -vatti endings are both in use; they are two forms of the same ending, the word for a wick. Amarkosh also lists sugandhapatti and vāsanaippatti, both meaning "fragrant stick", which we found in that one source only.

Agarbatti in Telugu

Telugu speakers say agarubatti or agarabatti; Amarkosh's Telugu entries also give ūduvatti and sāmbrāṇi kaḍḍī, a "sambrani stick". The last one is a good example of how resin names spread to sticks. We give these words in Roman letters only, because we could open just one Telugu dictionary for them; C. P. Brown's dictionary did not surface.

Agarbatti in Kannada

Kannada has the richest set. The Alar dictionary equates ಊದುಬತ್ತಿ (ūdubatti) with ಊದುಕಡ್ಡಿ (ūdukaḍḍi) and also lists ಅಗರುಬತ್ತಿ (agarubatti). Amarkosh adds ಅಗರಬತ್ತಿ (agarabatti) and ಗಂಧದ ಕಡ್ಡಿ (gandhada kaḍḍi), a "sandal" or "fragrance" stick. A 2019 report on Bengaluru's rollers in The News Minute records the spoken forms "Oodhinkaddi" and "Oodhubatthi".

Agarbatti in Malayalam

Malayalam says ചന്ദനത്തിരി (chandanathiri): chandanam, sandalwood, and thiri, a wick. Amarkosh defines it as a wick wrapped in fragrant substances, and Kerala newspapers use the same word when they write about how the sticks are made. People say chandanathiri whatever the fragrance is, but that usage is commonly said rather than recorded in a dictionary we could check.

How do you say agarbatti in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi and Odia?

Agarbatti in Hindi is अगरबत्ती, in Marathi उदबत्ती, in Gujarati અગરબત્તી, in Bengali ধূপকাঠি, in Punjabi ਅਗਰਬੱਤੀ and in Odia agarabatī.

• Hindi: Amarkosh defines अगरबत्ती as a wick burned for fragrance, and lists अगरू बत्ती and ऊदबत्ती as synonyms. धूपबत्ती usually means a dhoop-type stick.
• Marathi: उदबत्ती (udbattī) is the everyday word, also written with a long ū. Amarkosh defines it as a stick coated with a paste of ūd, dhoop and other fragrant materials. उदकाडी (udkāḍī) uses kāḍī, a small stick, in place of battī.
• Gujarati: અગરબત્તી (agarbattī) appears in the Central Hindi Directorate's trilingual Hindi–Gujarati–English dictionary, glossed "incense-stick", and in everyday Gujarati writing. Some commercial pages offer other Gujarati synonyms, which we could not confirm.
• Bengali: ধূপকাঠি (dhūpkāṭhi) joins ধূপ, incense, with কাঠি, a little stick. The Samsad dictionary glosses it as both "incense burner" and "incense stick", so context matters. Many speakers just say ধূপ.
• Punjabi: ਅਗਰਬੱਤੀ (agarbattī) is listed by Wiktionary, which we could see only through search results, and is used in PARI's Punjabi translations.
• Odia: Amarkosh gives agarabatī, with dhūpa as a synonym. We found no second dictionary, so we give the Roman form only.

Oodabathies: the old Bangalore name

When stick-making became an organised industry in Bangalore in the 1900s, the sticks were locally called "oodabathies", according to Wikipedia's article on Mysore Agarbathi. That is the ūd name again, in an English spelling of the time.

Karnataka is still called India's "agarbathi capital", with Mysuru and Bengaluru the main centres for scented sticks. "Mysore Agarbathi" was registered as a Geographical Indication in 2005, one of the first in India. That is why the "-bathi" spelling survives on many packs. The industry side of this story, from rollers to the new BIS standard, is in our guide to how agarbatti is made in India.

Agarbatti fragrance names in English

Agarbatti packs often name the fragrance in Hindi or Sanskrit. Here is what the common names mean in English, with the plant or material behind each.

A fragrance name on a pack tells you the intended scent, not the ingredient. A "chandan" stick may be scented with sandalwood aroma chemicals, and a "kasturi" stick uses a kasturi-type fragrance, because deer musk is protected in India. Which fragrance a family uses for which deity is a matter of custom; we look at that in our guide to which agarbatti fragrance for which deity and day.

Common mistakes when translating agarbatti

The most common mistake is to translate agarbatti as "dhoop". They are related but different: agarbatti has a bamboo core, and dhoop does not.

1. "Agarbatti means scent plus light." No dictionary we checked says this. The parts are agar, agarwood, and batti, a stick or wick.
2. "Incense" for the stick. Fine in conversation, but "incense stick" is clearer on a label or a shopping list.
3. Assuming the name means agarwood is inside. The name is historical. Check the fragrance on the pack.
4. One word for all of South India. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam each have their own words, listed above.
5. Copying a native-script spelling from an unsourced list. Typing errors spread quickly. Use a dictionary, or ask a speaker.
6. Calling "Mysore Agarbathi" any stick from Karnataka. It is a registered Geographical Indication, meant for products of its authorised users.

Which word should you use when shopping or searching?

Use "incense sticks" or "agarbatti" in English searches, and your own language's word when you speak to a local shop. Both find the same product.

• Online: "agarbatti", "incense sticks" and the fragrance name, for example "chandan agarbatti" or "rose incense sticks", give the widest results.
• For coreless sticks: search "dhoop sticks" or "dhoop batti".
• In a temple shop in the South: ūdubatti in Karnataka, ūdhupatti in Tamil Nadu and chandanathiri in Kerala are widely understood.
• Abroad: "incense sticks" is the usual term; "joss sticks" is an older name you may also see.

Whichever word you use, the way the stick is offered in puja stays the same. Our step-by-step guide to doing puja at home shows where the incense comes in the daily sequence, and our list of daily pooja essentials covers what to keep beside it.

How we checked these facts

We checked every word in at least one dictionary and, for native script, in a second independent source. Where a second source was missing, we left the script out and say so in the table. Etymologies come from the scholarly dictionaries cited by Wikipedia, and we report disagreements rather than choosing silently.

• Dictionaries: Rekhta Dictionary, agarbatti; Alar Kannada–English dictionary; Amarkosh, अगरबत्ती, with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Odia and Malayalam equivalents; the Madras University Tamil Lexicon and Molesworth's Marathi dictionary via Wisdom Library (ūtuvatti) and Wisdom Library (agarabattī); the Samsad Bengali–English Dictionary; the Central Hindi Directorate's Hindi–Gujarati–English dictionary, page 35.
• Etymology and history: Wikipedia's Incense in India (citing Burrow and Emeneau, Turner, Shulman and McHugh), Mysore Agarbathi and Dhupa; Wisdom Library on dhūpa; the TRAFFIC agarwood fact sheet (2023); the DC-MSME agarbatti project profile.
• Usage checks: Kerala Kaumudi, 22 May 2026 (ചന്ദനത്തിരി); PARI's Punjabi edition (ਅਗਰਬੱਤੀ); a Gujarati-language business article (અગરબત્તી); The News Minute, 2019 (Bengaluru spoken forms).

Several dictionary sites, including Wiktionary, Shabdkosh and the online Tamil Lexicon, returned empty pages while we worked; we used no mirrors to get round them. That is why Telugu and Odia appear in Roman letters only.

Related reading

Now that the names are clear, our guide to types of agarbatti explains masala, charcoal, dhoop, bambooless and cone sticks, and how agarbatti is made in India follows a stick from bamboo to pack. For the puja itself, see how to light agarbatti in puja and how to do aarti. If you are choosing a fragrance, start with which agarbatti fragrance for which deity and day; if smoke is your concern, read what studies say about agarbatti smoke. For the everyday puja tray, see our list of what goes on a puja thali.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is agarbatti called in English?

Agarbatti is called an incense stick in English, and dictionaries also list "joss stick". It is a thin bamboo stick coated with a fragrant paste that smoulders and gives off scented smoke. "Incense" on its own means the fragrant material or smoke rather than the stick.

What is the meaning of the word agarbatti?

Agarbatti means "agarwood stick". It joins agar, the resin-filled fragrant wood of Aquilaria trees, with batti, a stick or wick, which Wikipedia traces to Sanskrit varti. Linguists trace agar itself to Tamil akil, though Rekhta labels the word Sanskrit in origin.

Is agarbatti the same as incense?

Agarbatti is one kind of incense: incense rolled onto a thin bamboo core. Other kinds include dhoop, which has no core, incense cones, and resins such as sambrani, loban and guggul burned on hot coals. Camphor, burned for aarti, is a separate offering and not incense.

What is agarbatti called in Tamil?

In Tamil, agarbatti is ஊதுபத்தி (ūdhupatti), also spelt ஊதுவத்தி (ūtuvatti), or அகர்பத்தி (agarpatti). The Madras University Tamil Lexicon derives ūtuvatti from Urdu ūd, agarwood, rather than from ūdu, "to blow", which is the popular explanation.

What is agarbatti called in Telugu?

In Telugu, agarbatti is agarubatti or agarabatti; one dictionary also lists ūduvatti and sāmbrāṇi kaḍḍī, a "sambrani stick". We give these in Roman letters because we could confirm them in only one Telugu dictionary, not two independent sources.

What is agarbatti called in Kannada?

In Kannada, agarbatti is ಊದುಬತ್ತಿ (ūdubatti), which the Alar dictionary equates with ಊದುಕಡ್ಡಿ (ūdukaḍḍi). ಅಗರಬತ್ತಿ or ಅಗರುಬತ್ತಿ (agarabatti, agarubatti) and ಗಂಧದ ಕಡ್ಡಿ (gandhada kaḍḍi) are also used. A 2019 News Minute report records the spoken forms "Oodhinkaddi" and "Oodhubatthi".

What is agarbatti called in Malayalam?

In Malayalam, agarbatti is ചന്ദനത്തിരി (chandanathiri), from chandanam, sandalwood, and thiri, a wick. Amarkosh defines it as a wick wrapped in fragrant substances. Many speakers use chandanathiri for any incense stick, whatever its fragrance, though we found that usage described rather than defined.

What is agarbatti called in Hindi and Marathi?

In Hindi, agarbatti is अगरबत्ती (agarbattī), with अगरू बत्ती and ऊदबत्ती as synonyms; धूपबत्ती usually means a dhoop-type stick. In Marathi, the everyday word is उदबत्ती (udbattī), with अगरबत्ती and उदकाडी (udkāḍī) also in use.

What is agarbatti called in Sanskrit?

Sanskrit has no single word for the modern bamboo-core stick. Incense in general is dhūpa (धूप), which also names the incense offering in puja. Ancient and medieval texts call stick incense dhūpavarti, "incense wick", an early form made without a bamboo core.

What is agarbatti called in Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi?

In Bengali, agarbatti is ধূপকাঠি (dhūpkāṭhi), "incense stick", or simply ধূপ (dhūp). In Gujarati it is અગરબત્તી (agarbattī), and in Punjabi ਅਗਰਬੱਤੀ (agarbattī). The Bengali and Gujarati spellings were checked in a dictionary and one further source; the Punjabi spelling rests on Wiktionary, seen only through search, and on PARI's usage.

What is the difference between agarbatti and dhoop?

Agarbatti has a thin bamboo core coated with fragrant paste; dhoop has no core and is sold as a solid stick, cone or paste. A government project profile calls agarbatti "a development of Dhup". In English, dhoop is often called a dhoop stick or coreless incense stick.

Why are agarbattis called oodabathies or ūdbatti?

Ūdbatti and the old Bengaluru word oodabathies share the ūd- of Tamil ūtuvatti, which the Tamil Lexicon derives from Urdu ūd, agarwood. On that reading, ūdbatti and agarbatti mean the same thing. A popular reading, which Wikipedia gives for oodabathies, links ūdu, "to blow", with blowing fumes instead.

Divine Hindu Agarbatti

Divine Hindu Agarbatti is made in India and is charcoal-free, and it burns with less smoke than charcoal-dipped sticks. It is rolled by an NGO production unit under a Government-backed programme. Its seven fragrances, from chandan and rose to Kasturi Mrig, are traditionally used in daily puja, and you can see them all in the Divine Hindu agarbatti collection.

Spellings were checked in the dictionaries listed above in November 2026. Regional usage varies from district to district; if your family uses another word, it is no less correct. For puja practice, follow your family custom and your purohit's guidance.