Rhubarb cultivars have gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit:- "Rhubarb" originally comes from the two Greek words for rhubarb. "Rheon" from the Persian "rewend", later became the Latin word "rheum", meaning rhubarb. The other Greek word is "rha", an ancient name for the Volga River in Russian, where rhubarb was cultivated, having been introduced there from China via the Silk Road. In medieval Latin, "rheon" and "rha" became "rheum barbarum", literally "foreign rhubarb" or "strange rhubarb", and evolved later into "rheubarbarum". Most likely, the English word "rhubarb" entered the language via the French word "rhubarbe" brought over by
Nosferatu (word) sources, which severely undermines the credibility of the argument. Another common etymology suggests that the word meant "not breathing", which appears to be attempting to read a derivative of the Latin verb "spirare" ("to breathe") as a second morpheme in "nosferatu". Skal notes that this is "without basis in lexicography", viewing all these etymologies (including the widely repeated nosophoros etymology) with skepticism. A final possibility is that the form given by Gerard and the German folklorists is a well-known Romanian term without the benefit of normalized spelling, or possibly a misinterpretation of the sounds of the word due to Gerard's