Not the wood where rooks do congregate, but the misty or dark wood. The verb reek (to emit vapour) had the preterite roke, rook, or roak; hence Hamilton, in his Wallace, speaks of the “rooky mist.”
“Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the roaky wood.”
Shakespeare: Macbeth, iii. 2.
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.
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