Rook

How to spell rook

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rook

What does rook mean?

1. nounA black, crow-like bird that nests in noisy colonies high in tall trees.
2. nounA chess piece, shaped like a castle tower, that moves in straight lines along ranks and files.
3. verbTo cheat or swindle someone, especially out of money.

Rook in a sentence

• noun

  A single rook circled the ploughed field looking for grubs.

• noun

  She slid her rook across the open file to threaten the king.

• verb

  The dodgy mechanic tried to rook tourists with invented repair charges.

• noun

  The bare elm held a colony where every rook cawed at dawn.

• noun

  Castling lets the king and one rook move together in a single turn.

• verb

  Online scammers rook unwary buyers out of their deposits.

Where does rook come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The bird sense is the oldest and comes straight from Old English hroc, a native Germanic word for the noisy, sociable crow-relative; related forms appear across the old Germanic languages, and the name is widely thought to imitate the harsh cawing the bird makes. The chess piece called a rook arrived by a completely different road: it traces back to the Persian rukh, the name of a war chariot in early forms of the game, which travelled through Arabic and then Old French and Italian before settling in English in the late medieval period; the bird-shaped or castle-shaped carving is a later visual reinterpretation of that word. The slang verb meaning to cheat or swindle grew out of the bird sense, since rooks were seen as greedy, thieving birds, so to rook someone was to fleece them like a scavenging crow. All three senses converged on the same four-letter spelling despite their separate journeys. The double o spelling simply reflects the short vowel English settled on, the same one heard in book and look.

How the word is built

• rook (single root; from Old English hroc, the cawing crow-like bird)