Rose

Latin rosa, Greek rhódon, Arabic warda and Persian gul are a genuinely tangled case, and one of the better illustrations of how loanwords behave.

The Greek and Latin forms are related to each other, but the direction of travel is not a simple inheritance — the standard view is that both were borrowed, fairly early, from an Iranian source, and that Armenian and the Semitic forms belong somewhere in the same web. The rose is native to Central and West Asia. The word appears to have moved westward with the flower itself, along the same routes as the trade in its oil.

Persian gul is the most productive element on this page by a wide margin. It means flower generally and rose specifically, and it compounds endlessly: Gulnaz, Gulshan, Gulbahar, and dozens more across Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, Turkish and the Central Asian languages. In classical Persian poetry the rose and the nightingale are a fixed pair, and a very large share of these names come out of that literature rather than out of gardening.

Arabic warda and Hebrew vered are Semitic cousins. Sanskrit contributes gulāb — itself a Persian loan — alongside its own older vocabulary for flowers.

The rose is probably the most consistently feminine plant in the world's naming, and unusually, that association is not confined to one culture or one continent.