Floristry and ornamental growing

Entry nine is la cultivar, and it is the one word on this page that English gave away and now meets wearing somebody else’s clothes. It was coined in English in the 1920s, by contracting « cultivated » and « variety » into a single term for a plant sorted out by growers rather than by nature, and it went from there into the international codes and into every other language of the trade. Italian took it whole, letters and all, and then did to it what it does to any borrowed noun that ends in a consonant. It handed the word a gender, feminine, because the thing standing behind it is la varietà; and it refused to let the plural move, so the trade says una cultivar resistente and le cultivar più diffuse, never le cultivars. For an English reader the thing to carry away is therefore not the meaning, which came back unchanged, but the two marks added on the journey: the article now carries the gender, the adjective carries the number, and the noun itself stands still.