rookery

English

Etymology

rook +‎ -ery

Noun

rookery (plural rookeries)

1. A colony of breeding birds or other animals.
2. A crowded tenement.
   • 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 50, quoting Christian Wolmar:

     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.

3. (British) A place where criminals congregate, often an area of a town or city.
   • 1980, Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: life in an East End tenement block, 1887-1920‎, page 128:

     The Flower and Dean St rookery had been home to many of those who lived at least partly by street crime.

   • 1995, Cyrille Fijnaut, Changes in Society, Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe:

     These rookeries sustained criminal social systems that provided schooling in crime for the young and newcomers.

   • 1998, Stephen Inwood with Roy Porter, A History of London‎, page 522:

     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.

Translations

a colony of breeding birds or other animals

• Irish: garrán préachán m, adhbha rón f (seal rookery)
• Italian: colonia (it) f, zona di nidificazione f
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Russian: ле́жбище (ru) n (léžbišče)

References

• “rookery”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.