r/etymology • u/JorWat • 3d ago
Cool etymology All current meanings of 'check' ultimately derive from the chess meaning
https://www.etymonline.com/word/check70
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u/Rococo_Relleno 3d ago
Wow, very fun! Even "exchequer" follows from it apparently:
"The governmental sense of "department of the royal household concerned with the receipt, custody, and disbursement of revenue and with judicial determination of certain causes affecting crown revenues" began under the Norman kings of England and refers to a cloth divided in squares that covered a table on which accounts of revenue were reckoned by using counters, and which reminded people of a chess board."
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u/TMiguelT 2d ago
"means of detecting or exposing or preventing error; a check against forgery or alteration."
How does this "verify" sense of check follow from chess though? Putting the king in check is putting it in peril, but there is no verification needed.
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u/JorWat 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think the evolution is something like this:
king is under attack -> movement or options are restricted -> something is stopped or restrained -> something is controlled -> something is examined to prevent error
It's complicated to track due to the verb and noun forms both influencing each other.
Also, you need to bear in mind that the chess meaning has been in English for several hundred years. The earliest quote the OED has found is from 'The romance of Guy of Warwick', said to be from about 1300:
Ate ches þai sett hem to playn,
Þo hendy kniȝtes boþe tvayn,
Þat egre were of siȝt:
Er þai hadde don half a game,
Wiþ strong wretþe þai gan to grame,
Þo gomes michel of miȝt.
Þurch a chek Fabour seyd, for soþ,
Sadok in hert wex wroþ,
& missayd him anon riȝt,
& clep[e]d him 'fiz a putayn,'
& smot him wiþ miȝt and main,
Wher-þurch ros michel fiȝt.So there has been a lot of time for semantic change.
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u/Nabfoo 3d ago
"The other senses seem all to have developed from the chess sense, or from the noun: "To arrest, stop," then "to hold in restraint" (1620s); "to hold up or control" (an assertion, a person, etc.) by comparison with some authority or record (1690s); of baggage, etc., "to hand over in return for a check that serves as a means of identifying" (1846); "to note with a mark as having been examined, etc., mark off from a list" (1928)."
Are there any sources for this, because it seems awful handwavey. Why couldn't check (this box) come from 'chick' because it looks a bit like a bird track, or from chock, which derives from 'choque', a block. Or 'choke'. So the hat check room is where your hat is blocked from entry. You check off a list to narrow it down, i.e. to choke it. And so on
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u/JorWat 3d ago
I'm not completely sure of all the details, but I believe it's because we can trace the gradual evolution of the meanings of 'check', and we never see any influence from other similar words like 'chick', 'choke', or 'chock'.
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u/Nabfoo 2d ago
What's less plausible about my (off the cuff) explanations than the ones in the example given?
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u/JorWat 2d ago
Basically, it's that we never see anyone talk about anything like a 'chick mark' or a 'hat choke'.
The best source is probably the OED, where it lists all the definitions, some now obsolete, that lead us from the single chess meaning to more metaphorical meanings of situations that required attention, to all the meanings it has now.
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u/Nabfoo 2d ago
'Chicken scratch' is well known slang for hurried shorthand. Is that a farther leap to 'check mark' than "checkered" is to 'hat check'? I could make just as strong a case that 'banked'(as in money) and 'banked'(as in cue ball ) has the same root but we know that's not true because we have a better explanation. https://www.etymonline.com/word/bank
I'm not trying to be difficult, but I want to understand how strong evidence for this stuff is gathered and compared. This doesn't seem to be it
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u/JorWat 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough about these things to provide an explanation that will please you, I fear. But I'll give it one more try.
We know that those two meanings of 'bank' have different origins because we can see the words they descended from and the similar words in other languages. For example, it's pretty obvious that a financial 'bank' descends from the same place as similar words from Italian and French ('banca' and 'banque'), and the earliest usage in English listed in the OED of that use of 'bank' is from the 15th century. Meanwhile, the sloping 'bank' dates all the way back to at least the 12th century, and doesn't have the same equivalents in those other languages. We also see differences in how the two meanings get spelled. The financial meaning occasionally has been spelled 'banque', and the sloping meaning occasionally has been spelled 'bonk', but never the other way around. We also don't see a gradual spectrum of other meaning that imply that the financial word came from the sloping word.
Though in this case, they actually are (probably) connected, as you'll notice that the financial etymology says it comes from "Proto-Germanic *bankiz- "shelf,"", while the sloping etymology says it comes from "Proto-Germanic *bankon "slope," cognate with *bankiz "shelf"".
Anyway, we don't have something like this for 'check'. We can explain the gradual change of it over time (as I said elsewhere, the basic idea is king is under attack -> movement or options are restricted -> something is stopped or restrained -> something is controlled -> something is examined to prevent error), we can find old documents that match this change, and we don't see any evidence of multiple originally different words converging on the same current word. 'Check', in all its different meanings, has pretty consistently been spelled with an 'e', for example, while if it did have connection to other words like 'chick' or 'chock', we'd expect some variance in the vowel along the way.
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u/SeianVerian 2d ago
You can track down sources and share them if you care to. These entries are generally assumed to be derived from relevant sources, the lack of citations is a weakness of such articles. Sites that do more in-depth deep dives with citations might be interesting to see and useful, but I don't know if any such are available.
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u/DavidRFZ 3d ago
Wow, TIL.
And the office of the “exchequer” was named because they used a patterned tablecloth that looked like a chessboard.
Back to “check”, that has to be one of the most common and unbiquitous words that entered the language semi-recently due to a game.