Rogue

How to spell rogue

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rogue

What does rogue mean?

1. nounA dishonest or unprincipled person, or, more affectionately, a mischievous rascal.
2. adjectiveBehaving in an unpredictable, unauthorised or dangerously independent way.

Rogue in a sentence

• noun

  The landlord turned out to be a rogue who pocketed every deposit.

• adjective

  A single rogue trader cost the bank millions overnight.

• noun

  Her grandfather was a lovable rogue who never paid full price for anything.

• adjective

  The sanctions targeted what diplomats called a rogue state.

Where does rogue come from?

Language of origin: Other

Rogue surfaced in English around the middle of the 1500s as a slang term for a wandering beggar or vagabond, and its exact source is genuinely uncertain. The most popular suggestion links it to the older slang word 'roger', a name for a begging vagrant, which may in turn trace back to the Latin verb rogare, meaning 'to ask' or 'to beg', the same root that gives us 'interrogate'. From the original sense of a vagabond it broadened to mean any dishonest or unprincipled person, and then softened into the affectionate label for a likeable rascal. By the 1800s it had also taken on the adjectival sense of something dangerously out of control, first describing a solitary, ill-tempered elephant that had left the herd, then extending to rogue states and rogue agents. The tricky part of the spelling is the silent -ue ending, kept (as in 'vague' and 'league') so that the g stays hard rather than turning soft before a final e.

How the word is built

• rogue (single root; no productive prefix or suffix, the silent -ue preserves the hard /g/ ending)