Check It Out

The check you write to pay a bill is derived from the Shah of Iran. This is very long and convoluted, so hold on tight:

  1. Shah is the Persian word for king, and was the Iranian ruler's title in the pre-Ayatollah days.
  2. One import from Persia that Europeans took to enthusiastically was the "game of kings", which they called chess. (The game was actually invented in India, but the West learned of it through Persia. "Arabic numerals" were invented in India also, but were named for an intermediate in the same way. See "algorithm" below. Just to even things out, "India ink" comes from China.)
  3. A Persian technical term from the game was shah-mat — literally, "the king is dead" — marking the end of the match. By folk etymology, this became checkmate in English. (A matador is literally a "killer", a non-reflective "dead" surface is matte, and the various cities of Matamoros mean "Moor slayer".)
  4. A back-formation from checkmate created the chess term check, ("You are in check…"), warning that the king was under attack. Since this demanded the player's immediate attention, pre-empting all other strategy, it evolved into a general sense of stopping or hindering. ("His progress was checked.")
  5. From the board used in chess came check in the pattern sense ("She wore a checked dress") and the checkerboard, as well as the game of checkers, played on the same board.
  6. From the pattern came, via French, exchequer, which originally was a sort of manual spreadsheet — a large table or piece of paper divided into rows and columns to help the royal accountants keep track of income and expenses. The British equivalent of the US Secretary of the Treasury is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. (I suppose that this is the spot to point out that "treasure" is the French form of Greek thesauros, and see "cancel" below for the meaning of chancellor.)
  7. From the "follow the money" sense came:
    1. To check, meaning to examine closely — something accountants are supposed to do.
    2. The check mark, indicating that an item has been examined and verified.
    3. The check or cheque you pay bills with, because there is a "paper trail" you can use to more closely audit your expenses compared to paying cash.

Note that the police checkpoint has a double sense. It is both a place where persons are stopped and one where they are examined.

It really strains credulity, but Czech is a distant relative of check! Going way back, the Indo-European ksei- root meant "rule" or "ruler", giving not only "shah" but the Persian king Xerxes and the Bohemians' name for themselves. Yet more derivatives are satrap and pasha. (A certain Texas brewery used to have the slogan, "Our high-quality beer passes through thousands of Czechs a day.")

Speaking of India and Chess, there is a fable that a certain Emperor, a devotee of the new game, called the inventor into his presence and asked him what reward he desired for his great creation. The inventor said he merely wished the Emperor to give him one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the next, and so on. The Emperor, being no mathematician, agreed to this modest request. Unfortunately, he had committed to deliver (264 - 1) grains of rice — 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 to be exact — about a hundred cubic miles of the stuff. This story reminds me of the sardonic definition of a state lottery — a tax on people who flunked math.

Here's another oddity in chess terminology: To pin a piece is not related to pinning one's wrestling opponent. The latter word is from the sharp pin, in the sense "stick into place, do not allow movement". The chess pin, however, is where if a piece is moved in certain ways, it exposes a more valuable one, and it is actually a back-formation from pind, the same word as pound, an enclosure.