where does the term rook come from in chess
Rook (chess) 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 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 ("fortress"), and from there spread in the rest of Europe. Another possible explanation is that rooks represent siege towers – the piece is called torre ("tower"), in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; tour in French; toren in Dutch; Turm in German; and torn in Swedish. In Hungarian it is bástya ("bastion") and in Hebrew language it is called צריח (pronounced "Tzariach", meaning "fortified tower"). Another possibility is that, as chess moved to Europe long after chariot warfare had been abandoned, a different symbol was needed to represent the rook's concept of feudal power (the chariot being a method of warfare only used by the elite, very similar to medieval knights), and as such the Europeans adopted a castle to represent a lord and his feudal power, further supported by the (albeit later) name for the rook, the "marquess", named after a nobleperson. 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 Berserker 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".[6]