Other forms: roses
A rose is the flower with layered petals and a thorny stem. Red ones in cellophane at the petrol station on the fourteenth of February, white ones in a wedding bouquet, a scruffy pink one climbing over a garden wall.
Rose is also a colour — a soft warm pink, the pink of rose gold and rose wine. Rose water flavours sweets, a rose hip is the red fruit left behind when the petals fall, and a rose bush needs cutting back every winter. Two things trip learners up. First, rose is the past tense of rise as well: the sun rose, prices rose, she rose from her chair. Second, a rose has thorns, not spikes, and you say a bunch or a dozen roses, never a pack.
1nounroseA garden flower with soft layered petals and a prickly stem, grown for its scent and given as a gift.
“He turned up with a single rose and no explanation.”
synonyms: bloom
2adjectivecolourOf a soft warm pink colour.
“The bedroom walls were a pale rose that changed with the light.”
3nounwarmA soft warm pink.
“She chose a dusty rose for the curtains.”
4nounbushThe bush or shrub that this flower grows on.
“The roses along the fence need cutting back before the frost.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Rose reached English twice over. Old English already had rōse, but the vowel we say now was pushed into shape by Old French rose, and both come from Latin rosa. Behind the Latin stands Ancient Greek rhodon and, further back, a Proto-Indo-European word reconstructed as *wr̥dʰos, meaning sweetbriar — the wild thorny rose. The same ancient root travelled east as well, which is why Persian gol means rose and flower at once.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hwerdʰ-
Proto-Indo-European
*wr̥dʰos — sweetbriar
peo
*vr̥dah — flower
Ancient Greek
ῥόδον — rose
Latin
rosa
Old French
rose
Old English
rōse
Middle English
rose
English, today
rose
From Middle English rose, roose, from Old English rōse, but with its vowel influenced by Old French rose, both from Latin rosa. cognates and more remote and uncertain etymology The Latin is of unknown origin, but likely via osc - from Ancient Greek ῥόδον (“rose”) (Aeolic ϝρόδον), from peo vr̥dah (“flower”) (compare ae 𐬬𐬀𐬭𐬆𐬜𐬀, sog, xpr wâr, late pal, Persian گل (“rose, flower”), and Middle Iranian borrowings including xcl վարդ (“rose”), arc וַרְדָּא / ܘܪܕܐ, Arabic وَرْدَة, Hebrew וֶרֶד), from Proto-Indo-European wr̥dʰos (“sweetbriar”) (compare Old English word (“thornbush”), Latin rubus (“bramble”), Albanian hurdhe (“ivy”)). Possibly ultimately a derivation from a verb for "to grow" only attested in Indo-Iranian (Hwardʰ-, compare Sanskrit वर्धति, with relatives in Avestan).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA