rook1
/rʊk
/noun
A gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face, nesting in colonies in treetops.
- Corvus frugilegus, family Corvidae.
- 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.
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.
Origin
Old English hrōc, probably imitative and of Germanic origin; related to Dutch roek.
Rhymes
rook2
/rʊk/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. See also castle.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.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French rock, based on Arabic ruḵḵ (of which the sense remains uncertain).