Rhubarb is sour pink stalks cooked with lots of sugar. Rhubarb crumble, stewed rhubarb, force the rhubarb.
The leaves are poisonous and only the stalks are eaten. Forced rhubarb is grown in dark sheds and picked by candlelight, and you can hear it growing. It is a vegetable that a court once ruled a fruit for tariff purposes. In theatre, actors muttered rhubarb to sound like a crowd.
1nounrhubarbA plant with sour pink stalks eaten cooked.
“My grandmother made a crumble with rhubarb from her garden.”
rhubarb is a plant.
Latin rheubarbarum probably means barbarian rhubarb, from the Greek name of the Volga plus a word for foreign.
Ancient Greek
βαρβαρικόν
grc-koi
ῥῆον βαρβαρικόν
Latin
reubarbarum
Anglo-Norman
reubarbe
Middle English
rubarbe
English, today
rhubarb
Built from
From Middle English rubarbe, from Anglo-Norman reubarbe (modern French rhubarbe), from Latin reubarbarum, rheubarbarum, rubarbera, rybarba, probably from grc-koi ῥῆον βαρβαρικόν, from ῥῆον (“rhubarb”) + Ancient Greek βαρβαρικόν, neuter of βαρβαρικός (“foreign; barbaric”) (English barbaric). There is also a Medieval Latin - variant rabarbarum, which appears to be influenced by ῥᾶ (“rhubarb”), and gave rise to some of the forms in modern languages. The Ancient Greek variant term appears to have been folk-etymologically influenced by Ancient Greek Ῥᾶ (“the River Volga”), which is in the region from which the plant came to the Mediterranean. The ultimate origin of the Ancient Greek terms is, however, ira-pro (h)rabā́š (“rhubarb, fennel”). The word is cognate with Catalan ruibarbre, Italian rabarbaro, Dutch rabarber, German Rhabarber, Old Occitan reubarbe, Portuguese ruibarbo, Spanish ruibarbo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA