rogues' gallery

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

rogue +‎ gallery. Popularized by American detectives Allan Pinkerton and Thomas F. Byrnes.

Pronunciation[edit]

  • (file)

Noun[edit]

rogues' gallery (plural rogues' galleries)

  1. A set of pictures of convicted or suspected criminals used in law enforcement investigations to help witnesses identify suspects.
    • 1866, "Readings for the Young: The Rogues' Gallery," in The Christian Treasury, Johnstone, Hunter & Co. (Edinburgh), pp. 322-323:
      When the policemen arrest a man . . . if there is good reason to suspect him, they take his picture before they let him go. . . . Then they put the picture up in the rogues' gallery among the others, where everybody who comes there can see it.
    • 1984, William Diehl, Hooligans, →ISBN, page 41:
      "Recognize these people?" Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues' gallery.
      I nodded. "All of 'em. Cutthroats to the man."
  2. (idiomatic, by extension) Any group of lawbreakers or other disreputable characters.
    • 1997, Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey, →ISBN, page 325:
      The old staple of every demonstration: gully gully may shor hai, Congress Party chor hai—the cry goes up in every alley, Congress Party is a 'rogues' gallery—was very much in evidence.
    • 2006 February 6, “The Man Who Sold the Bomb”, in Time:
      For more than a decade, Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, masterminded a vast, clandestine and hugely profitable enterprise whose mission boiled down to this: selling to a rogues' gallery of nations the technology and equipment to make nuclear weapons.
  3. (fiction) The set of supervillains associated with a particular superhero or comic book title.

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