Dictionary

rookery en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Etymology

From rook + -ery, 1725.

Meanings

1. A colony of breeding birds or other animals.
   • In winter rooks roost together in large numbers, and the roost may or may not be a rookery, but almost daily the local residents pay visits to the nesting trees, and about this time often begin playing at nest-building. 1914 February 2, “Corvine conversation in Cheshire rookery”, in The Guardian:
   • It was a rookery which had never been raided by the hunters, and in consequence the seals were mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid. 1904, Jack London, chapter 30, in The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan’s Standard Library), New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC:
   • There are six rookeries either side of Haddiscoe Island, which average 283 nests each. 2017 April 18, Mark Cocker, “Something is amiss with the Yare valley rooks”, in The Guardian:
2. (broadly) A crowded tenement.
   • The squares near Ladbroke Grove station ... never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington. 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 50, quoting Christian Wolmar:
   • Lord John Roxton and I turned down Vigo Street together and through the dingy portals of the famous aristocratic rookery. 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
   • Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm. In their beds in the five-story rookery lay more than 100 tenants. 1934 April 2, “Business: Tenements”, in Time, archived from the original on 05 Mar 2012:
3. (UK, broadly, historical) A place where criminals congregate, often an area of a town or city.
   • In the Victorian imagination, crime and the criminal class were always associated with rookeries, the dense slum areas in which criminals were said to live. 1998, Stephen Inwood with Roy Porter, A History of London, page 522:
   • The Flower and Dean St rookery had been home to many of those who lived at least partly by street crime. 1980, Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: life in an East End tenement block, 1887-1920, page 128:
   • These rookeries sustained criminal social systems that provided schooling in crime for the young and newcomers. 1995, Cyrille Fijnaut, Changes in Society, Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe:
4. (obsolete, slang) That part of the barracks occupied by subalterns.

Forms

Deriveds

rookeried

Synonyms

slum

Translations (7)

ru ле́жбище (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · ga garrán préachán (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · it zona di nidificazione (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · it colonia (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · de Kolonie (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · de Krähenkolonie (a colony of breeding birds or other animals) · ga adhbha rón (a colony of breeding birds or other animals)