Main definitions of rook in English

: rook¹ rook²

rook¹

noun

A gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face, nesting in colonies in treetops.
Corvus frugilegus, family Corvidae
- ‘Birds - blackbirds and thrushes, robins, starlings, rooks and crows, jays, ducks, seagulls and owls will eat slugs.’
- ‘Crows belong to the family of corvids, which also includes rooks, jays, ravens and jackdaws.’
- ‘Outside the city walls, the fields would have supported birds such as starlings, rooks and crows, just as you can see today but in greater abundance.’
- ‘I turned my head to see a flock of crows and rooks burst out from the highest trees and fly overhead.’
- ‘People often write in about the conventional terms for groups of animals and people, especially birds, such as parliament of rooks or murder of crows.’
- ‘We found the broken bodies of infant rooks fallen from the nests all along the towers while the walls resounded with the echoes of those who had not fallen but grown to noisy maturity.’
- ‘Thrushes sing in the green shrubbery; rooks caw in the elms.’

verb

[with object]informal

Defraud, overcharge, or swindle (someone)
‘police files are overflowing with complaints from people who've been rooked’
‘that lawyer rooked me out of it’
- ‘And they were convinced they'd rooked us… Yeah, the perfect business deal.’
- ‘He once said: ‘If we were to apply the Sermon on the Mount to our business, we would be rooked within six months.’’
- ‘I started to notice that I was getting rooked by the sites about a year ago.’
- ‘I told her that I'd be back tomorrow and so I went back after chores today with some stuff, and she must have rooked in 30 or 40 people in the couple of hours I was there.’
- ‘‘And I got rooked into being his companion,’ grumbled Pip.’

Origin

Old English hrōc, probably imitative and of Germanic origin; related to Dutch roek.

Pronunciation

rook

/rʊk/

Main definitions of rook in English

: rook¹ rook²

rook²

noun

A chess piece, typically with its top in the shape of a battlement, that can move in any direction along a rank or file on which it stands. Each player starts the game with two rooks at opposite ends of the first rank.
- ‘With the rise in use of exchange sacrifices, rook versus minor piece endgames are becoming more common, and there are key defensive techniques that a player must know.’
- ‘In the even rarer case of two rooks vs. three minor pieces, the limited statistics give the minor pieces a slight edge provided they include the bishop pair, which they usually do.’
- ‘All the pieces move in straight lines like the rook or castle in chess, and a piece may be moved any number of squares providing no other piece is standing in the way.’
- ‘This gives an empty row between the pawns and the main pieces that the rooks can move into, supporting each other; the other pieces can develop more easily, too.’
- ‘Chess has six types of pieces (pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen and king) each with individual parameters that govern movement.’
- ‘Erial returned to the game long enough to move her rook into a position that severely threatened his queen, before continuing her train of thought.’
- ‘So as a rule, kings should advance and roam the board in the opening, and a rook should get behind a passed pawn in the middlegame?’
- ‘But white blundered away a pawn when rooks were exchanged, then had to sack his bishop to stop a passed pawn.’
- ‘For example, thinking that trading a rook and pawn for a bishop and knight is usually an equal trade.’
- ‘David got revenge for this by moving his right rook seven spaces forward, taking Floyd's pawn.’
- ‘If she moved the rook instead, I would capture a pawn, and place her king in check.’
- ‘Just then, I noticed something on the board, moved my rook and declared, ‘Checkmate!’’
- ‘A hand silhouetted against the wall picked up a rook and moved it forward three squares, capturing a brave knight, and exposing the king.’
- ‘But once the chess game ended, the great powers lost interest in the rooks and pawns.’
- ‘It was littered with only a few pieces, my king, queen, two rooks and pawn my remaining pieces.’