rookie

noun rookies

1. An inexperienced recruit, especially in the police or armed forces. Corbett is convinced it was a systemic failure: "The Thames Train was driven by a rookie driver who had only just come into the job. It is, in fact, difficult to run through a red light, because you have to cancel the Automatic Warning System (AWS) and so on. But he continued for 700 yards and he ac
2. A novice.
3. An athlete either new to the sport or to a team or in his/her first year of professional competition, especially said of baseball, basketball, hockey and American football players.
4. UK A type of firecracker, used by farmers to scare rooks.

Similar: beginner, newbie, noob, tyro, novice

adjective rookier · rookiest

1. Non-professional; amateur The game was going well until I made that rookie mistake.

verb rookies · rookying · rookied

1. intransitive To be a rookie; to go through one's inexperienced learning period in a job, team, or organization. In 1977 he rookied as a smokejumper with the International Forest Fire Systems, a private firm that contracted smokejumping services to Canada's Northwest Territories.
2. transitive To haze one or more rookies as an initiation ritual. Great was my surprise when I found that I had been "rookied" in for a policing-up detail with no chance to "allez."