Rookie
adj, noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An inexperienced recruit, especially in the police or armed forces.
- 2 an awkward and inexperienced youth wordnet
- 3 A novice.
- 4 An athlete either new to the sport or to a team or in his/her first year of professional competition, especially said of baseball, basketball, hockey and American football players.
- 5 A type of firecracker, used by farmers to scare rooks. British
- 1 To be a rookie; to go through one's inexperienced learning period in a job, team, or organization. intransitive
"In 1977 he rookied as a smokejumper with the International Forest Fire Systems, a private firm that contracted smokejumping services to Canada's Northwest Territories."
- 2 To haze one or more rookies as an initiation ritual. transitive
"Great was my surprise when I found that I had been "rookied" in for a policing-up detail with no chance to "allez.""
- 1 Non-professional; amateur
"The game was going well until I made that rookie mistake."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The rookie breathed new life into the team."
Etymology
Thought to be an alteration of recruit + -ie, or from rook (“a cheat”) + -ie. Another possible origin is Dutch broekie (short for broekvent (“a boy still in short trousers”)), a common term for a shipmate. Also suggested is Irish rúca (“an inexperienced person”).
Related phrases
More for "rookie"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.