How a Persian word for “king”, shouted over a chessboard, became stopping, testing, a cloakroom ticket, a bank cheque and a ✓. Tap ▶ to hear each step read aloud.
The game of chess was born in India and travelled to Persia, where it was called shatranj.
In Persian, shāh means king. When a player attacked the other king, he called out Shāh!
, meaning “Watch out, your king!”
When the king could not escape, the player said shāh māt: “the king is helpless”.
That became our checkmate.
The Arabs took chess west, through Spain and Sicily, into Europe.
The plural, eschecs, became the name of the game itself: chess in English, échecs in French.
The board of light and dark squares gave us chequered (checked) patterns and the game of checkers.
In Norman England, the king’s officials counted money on a table covered with a squared cloth, like a chessboard. The royal treasury was called the Exchequer, and Britain’s finance minister is still the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
In chess, check stops the king: it cannot move freely.
Examples: to check the enemy’s advance
, to check your anger
, a body check
in ice hockey.
If you stop something, you can look at it carefully. So to check came to mean to examine, to make sure.
Examples: check your spelling
, check the tyres
, a checkpoint
at the border.
In government, checks and balances stop any one power from becoming too strong.
To stop cheating, a ticket was cut in two: you kept one half and the other was kept to check against it.
So a check became a token: a cloakroom check
, a baggage check
, and a rain check
, the ticket for a game cancelled by rain, now meaning “let’s do it another time”.
Banks used the same trick: a written order to pay, with a stub kept to check it against forgery. This is a cheque in British spelling and a check in American spelling.
In American restaurants the bill is also the check: Could we have the check, please?
When you have checked something, you mark it: ✓, a check mark in American English, a tick in British English.
At a hotel or an airport, your name is checked on a list: you check in and check out.
| chess | from eschecs, “checks” |
| checkmate | shāh māt, the king is helpless |
| Exchequer | the treasury’s chessboard table |
| chequered | squared like a chessboard; also “a chequered past”, full of ups and downs |
| checklist, checkpoint | places and lists for checking |
| rain check | “let’s do it another time” |
Échecs is chess, échec et mat is checkmate, and chèque is a cheque. And un échec, a failure, is simply what happens when you are stopped, like a king in check.
Think of check as:
“Stop, king!”