Rook (chess)

The white rooks start on squares a1 and h1, while the black rooks start on a8 and h8. The rook moves horizontally or vertically, through any number of unoccupied squares (see diagram). As with captures by other pieces, the rook captures by occupying the square on which the enemy piece sits. The rook also participates, with the king, in a special move called castling.

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

Starting positions of the rooks

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

The white rook can move to any square marked with a white dot. The black rook can move to squares with a black dot, or it can capture the white pawn on e7.

Illustration of a siege tower, which the rook may be intended to represent

In the medieval shatranj, the rook symbolized a chariot. The Persian word rukh means "chariot"(Davidson 1949:10), and the corresponding piece in the original Indian version, chaturanga, has the name ratha (meaning "chariot"). In modern times it is mostly known as हाथी (elephant) to Hindi-speaking players, while east-Asian chess games such as xiangqi and shogi have names also meaning chariot (車) for the same piece.[5]

Persian war-chariots were heavily armored, carrying a driver and at least one ranged-weapon bearer, such as an archer. The sides of the chariot were built to resemble fortified stone work, giving the impression of small, mobile buildings, causing terror on the battlefield.

In Europe the castle or tower appears for the first time in the 16th century in Vida's 1550 Ludus Scacchia, and then as a tower on the back of an elephant. In time, the elephant disappeared and only the tower was used as the piece.[6]

In the West, the rook is almost universally represented as a crenellated turret. The piece is called torre ("tower") in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; tour in French; toren in Dutch; Turm in German; torn in Swedish; and torni in Finnish. In Hungarian it is bástya ("bastion") and in Hebrew language it is called צריח (pronounced "Tzariach", meaning "fortified tower"). In the British Museum's collection of the medieval Lewis chess pieces the rooks appear as stern warders, or wild-eyed Berserker warriors.

Rooks usually are similar in appearance to small castles, and as a result a rook is sometimes called a "castle" (Hooper & Whyld 1996). Modern chess literature rarely, if ever, uses this term.[7]

In some languages the rook is called a ship: Thai เรือ (reūa), Armenian Նավակ (navak), Russian ладья (ladya), Javanese ꦥꦫꦄꦲꦸ (prahu). This may be because of the use of an Arabic style V-shaped rook piece, which some may have mistaken for a ship.[8][9][10][11] It is possible that the rendition comes from Sanskrit roka (ship); however, no chaturanga pieces were ever called a roka. Murray argued that the Javanese could not visualize a chariot moving through the jungles in sweeping fashion as the rook. The only vehicle that moved in straight fashion was ship, thus they replaced it with prahu. Murray, however, did not give an explanation of why the Russians call the piece a "ship".[11]

Peter Tyson suggests that there's a correlation between the name of the piece and the word rukh, a mythical giant bird of prey from Persian mythology. [12]

In Bulgarian, it is called the cannon (Топ, Romanised top).

In Kannada, it is known as ಆನೆ (āāne), meaning "elephant".[13] This is unusual, as the term for "elephant" is in many other languages applied to the bishop.[14]

Arms of the English family of Rookwood, featuring chess rooks as a cant on the name

Chess rooks frequently occur as heraldic charges. Heraldic rooks are usually shown as they looked in medieval chess-sets, with the usual battlements replaced by two outward-curving horns. They occur in arms from around the 13th century onwards.

In Canadian heraldry, the chess rook is the cadency mark of a fifth daughter.

Unicode defines two codepoints for rook:

♖ U+2656 White Chess Rook (HTML ♖)

♜ U+265C Black Chess Rook (HTML ♜)

• Alburt, Lev (December 2009), "Back to Basics", Chess Life, 2009 (12): 44–45
• Barden, Leonard (1980), Play Better Chess with Leonard Barden, Octopus Books Limited, p. 10, ISBN 0-7064-0967-1
• Brace, Edward R. (1977), "rook", An Illustrated Dictionary of Chess, Hamlyn Publishing Group, pp. 241–42, ISBN 1-55521-394-4
• Davidson, Henry (1949), A Short History of Chess (1981 paperback), McKay, ISBN 0-679-14550-8
• Fine, Reuben; Benko, Pal (2003), Basic Chess Endings (1941) (2nd ed.), McKay, ISBN 0-8129-3493-8
• Griffiths, Peter (1992), Exploring the Endgame, American Chess Promotions, ISBN 0-939298-83-X
• Hooper, David; Whyld, Kenneth (1996) [First pub. 1992], "rook", The Oxford Companion to Chess (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press, pp. 343–44, ISBN 0-19-280049-3
• Horton, Byrne J. (1959), Dictionary of modern chess, New York: Philosophical Library, p. 175, ISBN 0-8065-0173-1, OCLC 606992
• Lasker, Emanuel (1947), Lasker's Manual of Chess, David McKay Company, p. 8, ISBN 0-486-20640-8, OCLC 3636924
• Pandolfini, Bruce (1986), Let's Play Chess, Fireside, ISBN 0-671-61983-7
• Sunnucks, Anne (1970), "rook, the", The Encyclopaedia of Chess, St. Martins Press, ISBN 978-0-7091-4697-1

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chess rooks.

• Piececlopedia: Rook by Fergus Duniho and Hans Bodlaender, The Chess Variant Pages