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
Vulgar Latin quality of", while "" specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health. The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was '. This evolved to *"essere" in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix "-re" to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian ' and French ' through Proto-Gallo-Romance *"essre" and Old French ' as well as Spanish and Portuguese "" (Romanian "a " derives from "fieri", which means "to become"). In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb ', which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand", to