rooter

plural rooters

1. One who, or that which, roots; one that tears up by the roots.

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

   2017, Mildred Wart, Swamp Island

   3 more examples

   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.

   1994, Paul Quarrington, Civilization: And Its Part in My Downfall, page 205

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

   1999, The Secret Life of Animals, page 111

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

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

2. broadlyA type of heavy machinery similar to a plow for breaking up soil, concrete, asphalt, etc.

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

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

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   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.

   1920, Halbert Powers Gillette, Earthwork and Its Cost: A Handbook of Earth Excavation, page 122

   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.

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

   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).

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

3. artsA blade for producing a narrow groove in a piece of wood.

   1 more example

   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.

   2023, William Bemrose, Manual of Buhl-Work and Marquetry, page ii

4. A device for boring a pathway through a blocked drain or sewer.

   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.

   2007, Scot Gardner, The Legend of Kevin the Plumber

5. One who roots or rummages through something.

   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 […]

   1969, Stephen King, The Reaper's Image

6. computingA type of malware that obtains and runs using privileged access, bypassing normal security systems.

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

   2003, Lance Spitzner, Honeypots: Tracking Hackers, page 19

   1 more example

   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.

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

7. One who holds a primary or founding position in an enterprise.

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

   1992, Betty Malz, Morning Jam Sessions, page 185

   1 more example

   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.

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

8. A plant, viewed in terms of how it establishes its roots.

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

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

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

   1953, Leslie John Audus, Plant Growth Substances, page 116

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

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

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

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

plural rooters

1. USslangOne who roots for, or applauds, something.

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

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

   4 more examples

   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.

   1901, “The Regeneration of a Rooter”, in California Occident, volume 41, page 399

   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.

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

   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.

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

   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.

   2023, Ambrose Bierce, Staley Fleming's Hallucination