rocks

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of rock.

   Geologists labeled each of the rocks they pulled from the trench.

   Waves had worn the jagged rocks into rounded shapes over centuries.

   Note

   The plural belongs to the countable uses of rock. Rock as the material of the earth's crust takes no plural. So rocks can be boulders, outcrops standing out of the ground or water, or bare islands, and in US and Canadian use the word stretches down to pebbles. Colloquially, rocks can also be gems, especially diamonds. The same spelling is also the verb form, as in a cradle that rocks.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of rock.

   The ferry rocks hard whenever a large wake hits its side.

   The grandmother rocks her chair slowly on the porch each evening.

   Note

   The form carries every sense of the verb rock, so it can take an object or stand alone: she rocks the cradle, the cradle gently rocks. Standing alone, it also serves as casual praise: "Baseball rocks!" This use draws on the sense of doing well or running at full efficiency. The intransitive pattern is what lets a bare subject plus rocks work as a compliment.

3. 3
   nounslangplural

   Money, especially cash.

   By the end of the night he'd lost most of his rocks at the card table.

   They needed serious rocks to get the business off the ground.

   Similarmoney, cash, dough, bucks, bread

   Note

   A slang word for cash that exists only in the plural: nobody speaks of a single rock of money. It belongs to casual talk, such as losing your rocks at cards or needing serious rocks for a venture, and it is out of place in writing about finance. The same fixed plural also names crack cocaine, so the surrounding talk has to make clear which is meant.

4. 4
   nounslangplural

   Crack cocaine.

   The raid turned up a stash of rocks wrapped in plastic under the floorboards.

   Dealers cut the supply into rocks small enough to sell on the street.

   Similarcrack

   Note

   Street slang for crack, marked most clearly by the collocation smoking rocks. "Have you been smoking rocks again?" asks about drug use, not stones. As with the slang for money, the plural is fixed. Words of dealing and hiding, such as a stash of rocks or rocks sold on the street, point the same way. Usually the verb or the setting settles which meaning is in play.

5. 5
   nounslangvulgarplural

   The testicles.

   A stray elbow in the scrum got him square in the rocks.

   He winced and grabbed his rocks after the ball took a bad bounce.

   Similarballs, nuts, testicles

   Note

   Vulgar as well as slang, this sense belongs to crude humor and rough banter, never to medical talk or polite company. Like the slang for money, it lives only in the plural. Being hit "in the rocks" is the typical setting: a joke about a painful blow. In any neutral or clinical context, testicles is the safe word.

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