Rhubarb,
rubarb, roobarb...
In his
excellent recent book Spell It Out, David
Crystal reports that, searching the internet over the past six years, he has
noted an increase in the spelling rubarb
over the traditional spelling rhubarb. In 2006 there were just a few hundred
occurrences of this spelling, by 2011 there were more than a million instances. Crystal predicts that over the next five
years rubarb will become the more
common spelling of the word online, concluding that the ‘offline world’ will
follow suit over the next decade.
The spelling
rubarb isn’t actually a new
development, but rather a return to the word’s origins, since its earliest
spelling in Middle English is reubarb. The word was borrowed from the French reubarbe, only adopting the form rhubarb in the sixteenth century by
comparison with the original form of the word in Greek: rheon barbaron. The Greek
term literally means ‘foreign rhubarb’; the word barbaron being the root of our word barbarous.
The problem
with using the Internet as a linguistic corpus is that it’s changing all the
time, so that you don’t really know what you’re searching. Many of these rubarbs are not genuine uses of the word but Trade names, personal
names and pet names. Searching the
digital archive of The Times
newspaper, which covers the period from 1785-2006, suggests that the rubarb spelling was much less common in
print during that period – just 23 instances, against 4845 of rhubarb.
The Oxford English corpus, a collection of 2 billion words of contemporary
spoken and written English, has just 7 instances; the only examples found on The Guardian website are from an article
by David Crystal!
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