The Hungarian word gulyás means cattle herder, and the dish began as their meal. Traditional gulyás uses beef, onion, paprika, caraway, potatoes, carrots and small pinched noodles called csipetke. In Hungary it is usually a soup. Paprika reached Europe only in the sixteenth century, so the earliest herders' stews would not have had it.
Hungarian cooks keep careful categories. Pörkölt is a thicker stew that grew out of gulyás, and paprikás is pörkölt finished with sour cream. Gulyás is never thickened with flour.
American goulash shows up in cookbooks by 1914. Today it usually means elbow macaroni, ground beef and tomatoes, a close relative of chili mac. In English, the word also came to mean any jumble.