The routes by which trade, encounters and learning reshaped English.
checkmate (n.)
Collection
Words That Travelled
Checkmate ends a game of chess: the king is attacked and cannot escape. The word came into English in the fourteenth century from Old French eschec mat, from Arabic shāh māt.1
The Arabic is usually read as “the king died.” But shāh is the Persian word for king, and Persian māt can mean astonished, so the phrase may first have meant that the king was left helpless rather than dead.1
Check comes from the same shāh, and it travelled far from the board. The officials of the Norman kings of England counted the royal revenue with counters on a table covered with a chequered cloth, which looked like a chessboard, and their department became the Exchequer.2 The bank cheque, from 1798, probably took its spelling from the exchequer.1
Three moves later it was checkmate.