rogues' gallery

See also: rogue's gallery and rogues gallery

English

Etymology

From rogue +‎ gallery. Popularized by American detectives Allan Pinkerton and Thomas F. Byrnes.

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

rogues' gallery (plural rogues' galleries)

1. A set of pictures of convicted or suspected criminals used in law enforcement investigations to help witnesses identify suspects.
   • 1866, "Readings for the Young: The Rogues' Gallery," in The Christian Treasury, Johnstone, Hunter & Co. (Edinburgh), pp. 322-323:

     When the policemen arrest a man . . . if there is good reason to suspect him, they take his picture before they let him go. . . . Then they put the picture up in the rogues' gallery among the others, where everybody who comes there can see it.

   • 1984, William Diehl, Hooligans, →ISBN, page 41:

     "Recognize these people?" Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues' gallery.
     I nodded. "All of 'em. Cutthroats to the man."

2. (idiomatic, by extension) Any group of lawbreakers or other disreputable characters.
   • 1951 December, Michael Robbins, “John Francis's "History of the English Railway"”, in Railway Magazine, page 800:

     By 1859, D. Morier Evans was exhibiting [George] Hudson as the principal character in his rogues' gallery entitled "Facts, Failures and Frauds"; and at the hands of modern economic historians he has been written down as a common swindler.

   • 1997, Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey, →ISBN, page 325:

     The old staple of every demonstration: gully gully may shor hai, Congress Party chor hai—the cry goes up in every alley, Congress Party is a 'rogues' gallery—was very much in evidence.

   • 2006 February 6, “The Man Who Sold the Bomb”, in Time:

     For more than a decade, Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, masterminded a vast, clandestine and hugely profitable enterprise whose mission boiled down to this: selling to a rogues' gallery of nations the technology and equipment to make nuclear weapons.

3. (fiction) The set of supervillains associated with a particular superhero or comic book title.

Alternative forms

• rogue gallery

See also

• murderers' row

Further reading

• rogues' gallery on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “rogues gallery”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.