rookie

Forms

1.An inexperienced recruit, especially in the police or armed forces.
2.A novice.
3.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.
4.A type of firecracker, used by farmers to scare rooks.

1.Non-professional; amateur
- The game was going well until I made that rookie mistake.

1.To be a rookie; to go through one's inexperienced learning period in a job, team, or organization.
- Grath and I had joined the Iron Bandits MC the same year; pledged together, rookied together.
- 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.
- He rookied in 1980 and settled in to play right field for the Detroit Tigers from 1983 to 1987 and was critical to the Tigers winning the 1984 World Series against the San Diego Padres.
2.To haze one or more rookies as an initiation ritual.
- There is none of that 'rookying stuff' but they don't pay any attention to you either, and that is worse.
- Great was my surprise when I found that I had been "rookied" in for a policing-up detail with no chance to "allez."
- I was rookied in women's (ice) hockey mid-winter. I was made to strip nude and walk into McDonald's and order a big Mac.

Rare· #4620

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”).