ریوند

The English word 'rhubarb' descends from medieval Latin rheubarbarum — itself built from Greek rheon barbarikon (foreign rhubarb) or from a Latinized form of the Persian rīwand (also rawānd), the name of the plant's medicinal root. Persian rīwand referred specifically to the dried root of Rheum officinale or related species — not the familiar stalks of Rheum rhabarbarum grown for cooking, but the rhizome of a Chinese and Tibetan species whose dried, powdered root was one of the most expensive and sought-after medicines in the medieval pharmacopoeia. Medieval physicians used rhubarb root as a purgative — one of the strongest and most reliable laxatives available before modern medicine — and it commanded prices comparable to saffron and opium.

The name contains layers of geography. The Latin rheubarbarum and the Greek rheon may derive from the name of the Rha River — the ancient Greek and Roman name for the Volga — through which rhubarb root was sometimes traded westward from Central Asia. The Greek barbarikon (foreign, barbarian) was added to distinguish this exotic medicinal rhubarb from local European species of the same genus. Persian rīwand is the indigenous name, used in Persian medical texts including Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine, where it appears as a primary purgative and liver medicine. The trade in Persian and Chinese rhubarb root was so lucrative that it was a state monopoly in the Russian Empire in the 17th–18th centuries, with Russia controlling the overland route between the Chinese sources and European markets.

The familiar rhubarb of pie and crumble — the bright-red leafstalks used as a fruit — is an entirely different use of the plant. Rheum rhabarbarum, the garden rhubarb, was brought to Britain and Europe in the 17th–18th centuries from Siberia and China. The medicinal root trade preceded the culinary use by at least five centuries. The word 'rhubarb' was applied to the edible stalks only after the plant became a garden vegetable in Europe, retrofitting the old medicine name onto a new food use. The theatrical tradition of actors muttering 'rhubarb rhubarb' as background conversation noise — giving 'rhubarb' the slang meaning of 'nonsense' — developed in British theater and is unrelated to the word's Persian-medicinal origin, though the idea of meaningless repetition suits a word with such a tangled history.