Rookie

How to spell rookie

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rookie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rookie mean?

1. nounA person in their first year or season of an activity, especially someone new and inexperienced at a job or sport.

Rookie in a sentence

• The rookie made a few nervous mistakes on his first shift.

• Every rookie on the squad trained twice as hard to keep a place.

Where does rookie come from?

Language of origin: Other

Rookie is an American coinage that surfaced in print around the very end of the 1800s, and the most widely accepted explanation is that it is a clipped and reshaped form of 'recruit', the raw newcomer to an army or a team. The childlike, informal ending '-ie' (the same one in 'newbie' and 'doggie') softened it into a nickname, and it caught on quickly in sport and the military for anyone in their first season or first year of service. Some writers have linked it instead to 'rook', the crow-like bird whose name had long meant a cheat or an easily fooled simpleton, but that connection is uncertain and may simply have reinforced an existing word. The spelling trap is that doubled middle 'oo' followed by the soft '-ie' ending, even though the vowel is pronounced as a short 'uh'. Whatever its precise birth, the word spread from baseball dugouts into general use for any inexperienced beginner.

How the word is built

• rook (probably an altered form of 'recruit')
• -ie (familiar, diminutive suffix)