rooter

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From root +‎ -er.

rooter (plural rooters)

1. One who, or that which, roots; one that tears up by the roots.
   • 1994, Paul Quarrington, Civilization: And Its Part in My Downfall, page 205:

     The rooter was terrorized, what with the mechanical noises right behind it, and it abandoned evasive turns and darts and made for the horizon with pitiful desperation.

   • 1999, The Secret Life of Animals, page 111:

     Juveniles arriving early tend to become rooters, while late arrivals are forced into stone-turning, having been chased away by the rooters.

   • 2009, Larry Jene Fisher, Thad Sitton, C.E. Hunt, Big Thicket People, page 70:

     Most rural farming families in the Big Thicket had “rooter hogs and woods cattle” roaming the free range around their homeplaces.

   • 2017, Mildred Wart, Swamp Island:

     Instantly, the rooters were upon it, tearing savagely at the meat and at each other.

2. (by extension) A type of heavy machinery similar to a plow for breaking up soil, concrete, asphalt, etc.
   • 1920, Halbert Powers Gillette, Earthwork and Its Cost: A Handbook of Earth Excavation, page 122:

     The five rooters or plows are so fastened in the frame that any one or all can be removed if desired, and each rooter is provided with a removable point, which can be taken off and sharpened without removing the entire rooter from the from the frame.

   • 1955, Dan K. Heiple, Earthmoving, an Art and a Science, page 18:

     Breaking old concrete is a simple task for powerful tractor and rooter if the teeth are hooked under slab edge and pulled forward, then raised up by rooter's cable lift.

   • 1959, United States. Bureau of Naval Personnel, Equipment Operator 3 & 2, page 177:

     If the airstrip site is on hard and rocky terrain, it will be necessary to loosen and break the soil by using a rooter.

   • 1968, Amihud Y. Goor, Charles Wesley Barney, Forest Tree Planting in Arid Zones, page 173:

     Under difficult soil conditions, rooters that work on the same principle as subsoilers are used. Rooters are larger, heavier, and more sturdily built than subsoilers and can loosen the soil up to a depth of 1 meter ( 3.3 ft ) (Fig. 4-6).

3. (woodworking) A blade for producing a narrow groove in a piece of wood.
   • 2023, William Bemrose, Manual of Buhl-Work and Marquetry, page ii:

     In cutting across the grain a small steel cutter, No. 10, must first be used in a similar manner, moving the strip of wood which acts as a gauge, to cut the second line exactly the same width as the "rooter" blade; the "rooter" is then used as before, when the piece between the two lines made by the cutter will be neatly removed without leaving a burr, which would not be the case if the "rooter" was alone used across the grain.

4. A device for boring a pathway through a blocked drain or sewer.
   • 2007, Scot Gardner, The Legend of Kevin the Plumber:

     The rooter was the tool that convinced me that plumbers and doctors were only alike if you'd missed out on your daily cone of mull. The head of the sewer rooter looked like something an alien would use to bore into your skull.

5. One who roots or rummages through something.
   • 1969, Stephen King, The Reaper's Image:

     Like so many of the self-made industry emperors of the late 1800s, he had been little more than a pawnshop rooter masquerading in collector's clothing, a connoisseur of canvas monstrosities, trashy novels and poetry collections […]

6. (computing) A type of malware that obtains and runs using privileged access, bypassing normal security systems.
   • 2003, Lance Spitzner, Honeypots: Tracking Hackers, page 19:

     In 2002 a new variant of auto-rooters was discovered in the wild: mass-rooters.

   • 2006, Harold F. Tipton, Micki Krause, Information Security Management Handbook, page 542:

     The structure of a rooter is a fixed package: a program that generates fixed shell code with a fixed payload, launching it at a single target chosen by the attacker.

7. One who holds a primary or founding position in an enterprise.
   • 1992, Betty Malz, Morning Jam Sessions, page 185:

     Basically there are two kinds of Christians, the tooters and the rooters - the talkers and the doers.

   • 2006, Waldemar Karwowski, International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors, page 3404:

     In today's context, any fair review of the "rooters" who contributed to the development of ergonomics and human factors would certainly include references to Earl A. Alluisi, because of his influence on the development of research area, academic programs, professional organizations, and individuals who have shaped the field.

8. A plant, viewed in terms of how it establishes its roots.
   • 1953, Leslie John Audus, Plant Growth Substances, page 116:

     It is now possible to see at a glance how good rooters and poor rooters compare in their response to auxin treatments.

   • 1964, Arthur George Lee Hellyer, The Amateur Gardener, page 355:

     In general the stem rooters need to be planted a good deal more deeply than the purely bulb rooting kinds.

   • 1983, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Bio-Dynamic Gardening and Farming - Volume 2, page 33:

     If only shallow rooters are present, the vegetation will die away quickly during a drought while interspersed deep rooters will thrive longer,

   • 2017, Steve Bradley, R. J. Garner, The Grafter's Handbook, page 93:

     A similar effect is obtained by binding the shy rooter with wire immediately above the graft.

• from the rooter to the tooter

From root (“to cheer for”) +‎ -er.

rooter (plural rooters)

1. (US, slang) One who roots for, or applauds, something.
   • 1901, “The Regeneration of a Rooter”, in California Occident, volume 41, page 399:

     Then, as the victorious team, streaming and slimy with mud, was borne by, literally in the arms of the populace, in a bit of momentary abstraction the beat wildly upon the thing nearest at hand, which happend to be the top of a blue and gold rooter's hat, beneath which, naturally enough, was the head of the aforementioned rooter.

   • 1970, Gerald S. Kenyon, Tom M. Grogg, Contemporary Psychology of Sport, page 308:

     In my country a mythology exists concerning the rooter. Great names, great deeds, great passions, great fights, and great deaths from heart attacks are the landmarks on the battlefield of a sport incorporated in Brazilian folklore. However, the different types of rooters are more interesting to the psychologist than soccer folklore proper.

   • 2007, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, page 58:

     My oldest brother is a hefty twelve years older; we never quite bonded, though he's always been my supporter—a real rooter for me in academic studies.

   • 2013, Jeffrey Michael Laing, Bud Fowler: Baseball's First Black Professional, page 145:

     He was a rooter if there ever was one. His enthusiasm was at a boiling heat all the time.

   • 2023, Ambrose Bierce, Staley Fleming's Hallucination:

     This was the Lawrencetown team and rooters, arriving for the fray. Led by the band the rooters gathered in a column four abreast and started to parade around the campus, later turning in the direction of the baseball diamond where they took up their section of the bleachers and forthwith began to hurl challenges at the now crowded buff and blue stands along third base line.

• reroot, torero

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rooter m (plural rooters)

1. (computing) router

rooter

1. (computing) to root