Cultivar
Definition: A cultivar, short for cultivated variety, is a plant variety that people have selected and maintained for specific, consistent traits. In cannabis, cultivar is the horticulturally correct word for what most growers and shops call a strain, and it emphasizes that the plant is a human selection rather than a wild type.
How Cultivar works
Strain is borrowed from microbiology, where it describes a genetic variant of bacteria or viruses. Botanists and horticulturists use cultivar for selected plant varieties, from Honeycrisp apples to Cherokee Purple tomatoes. As cannabis moves into mainstream agriculture, labs, regulators and many breeders have adopted cultivar, while shoppers still search for strain far more often.
Cultivar vs chemovar
Some researchers prefer a third term, chemovar, which groups plants by their chemistry rather than their name. Two plants sold under the same name by different breeders can have different terpene and cannabinoid profiles, so chemovar data from lab tests can be more useful than the name on a pack.
Why the distinction matters
- Naming drift: popular names get reused for unrelated plants. Check lineage and breeder, not just the name.
- Clone vs seed: a clone-only cultivar is one exact genotype; seeds sold under the same name are offspring and will vary.
- Consistency: a true cultivar implies stable traits. A fresh cross deserves the looser word strain.
On this site we use both words. Strain is what most people search, and cultivar is often what we mean.