Rook (chess)
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A rook (♖ ♜ borrowed from Persian رخ, rokh) is a piece in the strategy board game of chess. Formerly the piece was called the tower, marquess, rector, and comes (Sunnucks 1970). The term castle is considered informal, incorrect, or old-fashioned. However, in Persian the word for "castling" is qal'eh raften (from qal'eh, "castle") and not rokh raftan.
Each player starts the game with two rooks, one in each of the corner squares on their own side of the board.
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.
In the medieval shatranj, the rook symbolized a chariot. The Persian word rukh means chariot (Davidson 1949:10), and the corresponding pieces in the original Indian version chaturanga have ratha (meaning "chariot"), while east Asian chess games such as xiangqi and shogi have names also meaning chariot (車).
Persian war chariots were heavily armoured, 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. However, in the West the rook is almost universally represented as a crenellated turret. One possible explanation is that when the game was imported to Italy, the Persian rukh became the Italian word rocca, meaning fortress, and from there spread in the rest of Europe. Another possible explanation is that rooks represent siege towers – the piece is called torre, meaning tower, in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; tour in French; toren in Dutch; Turm in German; and torn in Swedish. An alternative name in Russian: тура (pronounced as toura). Finally, the chariot was sometimes represented as a silhouette, a square with two points above representing the horse's heads, which may have been seen to resemble a building with arrowports to the medieval imagination. An exception is seen in the British Museum's collection of the medieval Lewis chess pieces in which the rooks appear as stern warders or wild-eyed Berzerker warriors. Rooks usually are similar in appearance to small castles, and as a result a rook is sometimes called a "castle" (Hooper & Whyld 1992). This usage was common in the past ("The Rook, or Castle, is next in power to the Queen" – Howard Staunton, 1847) but today it is rarely if ever used in chess literature or among players, except in the expression "castling".
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