Meatball menu

A meatball menu is three dots lying flat, and the actions behind them. The name is the same kitchen vernacular that gave us the kebab and the hamburger: a kebab is skewered, so its dots stack vertically, and meatballs sit in a row on the plate. Nobody designed this vocabulary. It grew because the glyphs have no official names and people needed something to say in a review.

The honest part first: the distinction carries no functional difference at all. Rotate the dots and nothing about the component changes, not the menu, not the keyboard contract, not the accessible name it still needs. That is exactly why the words are worth pinning down. When two people are looking at the same screen the orientation is obvious and the name is redundant; in a ticket, a design review, or a search box it is the only handle anyone has, and “the three dots thing” matches both glyphs and finds neither.

Orientation does track placement, which is where the small amount of real design guidance lives. Horizontal dots read as belonging to the horizontal thing they sit at the end of, a table row or a card header, and they fill a wide slot better than a tall one. Vertical dots suit a narrow column and a list that is already a stack. Whichever way they lie, the rules of the overflow menu apply unchanged: give the trigger a real accessible name, because three dots announce nothing, and never let it be the only route to an action.

Platform habit explains most of what you will see. Material’s own menus put the vertical dots in a top app bar, so Android products lean kebab, while a great deal of web tooling puts the horizontal dots at the end of table rows. Both are conventions rather than rules, and mixing the two in one product is the actual mistake, since a reader learns one glyph as “there is more here” and then has to learn a second.