I always assumed that the word rookie, meaning a beginner, new recruit, or first-timer, was an Americanism because the first time I heard it was during the television commentary on an American football match – or “game” as they say over there – which I was watching in the USA. The Chicago Bears supporters sitting around me explained that it referred to a player in his first professional season. I also came across the usage “rookie cop” for a young policeman while I was in the States.
But I have subsequently wondered about the word’s origin. Few writers are more stereotypically British than Rudyard Kipling, and he used it in his writings as early as 1891: “You can’t drill, you can’t walk, you can’t shoot, – you, – you awful rookies!” (in Macmillan’s Magazine published in October that year). Nevertheless, the Oxford English Dictionary states that rookie was originally North American and is still chiefly so.
Most sources also agree that the term had military origins – the Dragoons (the Royal Dragoon Guards of the British army) are specifically mentioned more than once in this connection. The word dragoon itself dates from the 1620s in the meaning of a cavalry soldier who carries firearms, and so is capable of fighting either on horseback or, having leapt off, on foot. The term seems to be derived from the French word dragon meaning “carbine, musket”, and was possibly used as a name for such soldiers because their guns appeared to breathe fire like mythical dragons.
One guess as to the origin of the informal slang word rookie is that it had to do with the (mistaken) belief that rooks are gullible birds and thus are easy to cheat, like innocent new recruits. Indeed, an early meaning of the verb to rook, from 1595, was “to cheat or swindle, especially to win or extract money from (a person) by fraud; to charge (a person) extortionately”.
Another hypothesis has been that the name came from the black coats which were worn by new army recruits in certain parts of the USA, rooks being birds with very black feathers. Some dictionaries further suggest that rookie came into general use in American English during the Spanish-American war of 1898. Certainly the word was commented on in the columns of the December 1898 edition of the American magazine Midland Monthly, published in Des Moines, Iowa.
Another and perhaps more likely possibility is that rookie is derived from a shortening of the word recruit, although if so the change of vowel in the first syllable does take a little bit of explaining. The term may have come into being from this shortening coupled with some form of semantic association with the alleged gullibility of raw recruits, as in “he made a rookie mistake”.
Multiple causation of this type is often involved in the development of new linguistic forms; since there are so many things that can happen during linguistic change that for a particular change actually to occur, it helps to have more than one factor working in its favour.
However, the connection of this word to rooks is rather unfair, because they are in fact among the most intelligent of birds.
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Corvus frugilegus
The rook, Corvus frugilegus, has been shown to have a remarkable ability to solve puzzles in order to obtain rewards like food. Frugilegus is the Latin word for fruit-gathering, even though rooks in the wild do not typically do a great deal of that, preferring to consume grain. The term is made up of frux meaning “fruit” – the oblique, ie non-nominative, form is frugi – plus legere meaning “to pick”.
