Rover

How to spell rover

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rover

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rover mean?

1. nounA person who wanders or roams from place to place without a fixed home or route.
2. nounA wheeled vehicle designed to travel across the surface of a planet or moon to gather data.

Rover in a sentence

• After years of office work he became a restless rover, taking jobs in a different city each season.

• The Mars rover transmitted images of the crater back to the control room.

• The documentary followed one lifelong rover as he hitchhiked across three continents.

• Engineers spent months testing the six-wheeled rover in a simulated desert.

Where does rover come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Rover entered English in the 1300s from the Middle Dutch and Middle Low German word rover, meaning 'robber' or, more specifically, 'sea robber' or 'pirate', a noun built on the verb roven 'to rob, to plunder'. In its earliest English use it carried exactly that piratical sense: a rover was a marauder who roamed the seas seizing ships. Over time the idea of restless roaming detached itself from the crime, and the word was reshaped by association with the native verb 'rove', meaning 'to wander without a fixed destination'. By the 1500s a rover simply meant a wanderer or someone with no settled home. The same root surfaces in archery, where 'roving' once meant shooting at randomly chosen marks, and in modern times the name was borrowed for wheeled exploration craft such as the Mars rover. The spelling stays straightforward because it is just the plain verb 'rove' plus the common '-er' ending.

How the word is built

• rove (to wander, from Middle Dutch roven 'to rob')
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)