Old English rōse, of Germanic origin, from Latin rosa; reinforced in Middle English by Old French rose.

• The rose (from Latin rosa) is beautiful but prickly, and the proverbial saying no rose without a thorn goes back to medieval times. There is nothing spiky about an English rose, an attractive, fair-skinned English girl. A person who takes an unduly indulgent or optimistic view of things is said to be looking through rose-coloured spectacles. The idea here is that everything you look at is bathed in warm flattering light. Charles Dickens talked of living ‘in a rose-colored mist’ in Little Dorrit (1857), but the first example of the full phrase is from Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) by Thomas Hughes. The decorative quality of the rose is taken up in rosette ‘a little rose’ borrowed from French in the mid 18th century. A rosary means ‘a rose garden’ and appears in this sense in Middle English. There was a medieval Latin term for a prayer book hortulus animae ‘little garden of the soul’ and the idea of calling a series of prayers a rose garden (mid 16th century) probably came from this. Rosemary (Late Middle English) originally had no connection with ‘rose’ or ‘Mary’, although these have influenced the form the word now takes. The plant was Latin ros marinus ‘dew of the sea’. The plant grows wild by the sea in southern Europe, and the leaves have a misty blue cast. See also ring

French, literally 'pink'.