Why is a castle called a rook?

because rooks look like tower of castle.

The inability to answer questions, the senseless repetition of the same ideas, scattered references to things unconnected to each other or the topic, the knowledge of many subjects obviously imperfectly derived from nothing but online sources, lack of human common sense, gaps in logic, all make me wonder if we are taking part in some sort of AI experiment. Perhaps we are helping a machine learn how to go about expressing things in different languages without relying on word-for-word translation.

Many of Professor Lerer’s lectures are on YouTube. Good source for learning the history of English. His classes at UCSD were very popular.

Murray remains a better source for the OP’s question.

It sounds cooler lol

And yet, occasionally there is a good quality post like https://www.chess.com/forum/view/fun-with-chess/chess-originated-in-china-52038864?page=1#comment-52181710

Have you read Moby Dick?

Does the audio book have the portion that precedes, "Call me Ishmael"?

idk

goofy ahh

A castle is called a Rook because nobody has invented the word ROOKSLE yet.

Charlemagne never owned a chess set.

Bill Wall and hundreds of other posers have said so. The so-called Charlemagne set consists of pieces from at least two sets.

I've always thought of it as a rookorie where messenger birds are kept. The word rook means cheat, and the move castle is a bit of a cheat...

if it was called a castle you'd confuse it with castling

In many European languages the piece that we English-speakers call a rook is called a tower (turm, tour, torre for example).

In French the move we call castling, where the roi (king) and the tour (rook) both move past each other, is called roque.

None of this bears any relevance to the question of why the word "rook" is used in the English language to describe that chess piece. Chess came to Europe via Persia and Arabia. In the time period when this happened the Persian word for the piece transliterates to English as "madajar" and the Arabic word transliterates as "tabya". How could either of these be the source of the English word "rook"?

The question is: how did "rook" become the English term for the chess pieces? What somebody thousands of miles away called it many centuries ago is meaningless unless we trace that usage to modern English. The European piece looks nothing like a chariot, the intermediary languages do not use words for the piece that sound anything like "rook" and there is no evidence that the original pieces and/or terms have any connection to modern English usage. If you are only interested in something completely different, why should anyone here give a d**n what you have to say?

Any one who wants a battle