rose [OE] 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 [L18th], an attractive, fair-skinned English girl. The idea of rose-coloured (or tinted) spectacles [M19th] is that everything you look at is bathed in warm flattering light The decorative quality of the rose is taken up in rosette ‘a little rose’ borrowed from French in the early 17th 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 [M16th] probably came from this. Rosemary [LME] originally had no connection with ‘rose’ or ‘Mary’, although these have influenced the form the word now takes. The plant was ros marinus ‘dew of the sea’ in Latin. The plant grows wild by the sea in southern Europe, and the leaves have a misty blue cast. See also ring.