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START / NODE 205Present-Day English14th century–today
chess
The board game whose English name arrives through French chess vocabulary, with competing scholarly accounts of the deeper Persian and Arabic route.
“Chess may be a plural fossil: English borrowed French forms meaning the game or its pieces, tied either to the king-call šāh or to the traveling game-name šatranj.”OPEN COMPLETE WORD DOSSIER ↗
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01
PARENT ROUTES1 REVIEWED RELATIONSHIP
Present-Day Englishchess
the two-player strategy board game
↑GO DEEPER
Middle English · 14th–15th centurieschesse / ches / eschesthe game of chess
- SOUND CHANGE
- Middle English chesse / ches stabilizes as modern chess with final spelling simplification.
- SEMANTIC CHANGE
- The board-game meaning remains stable.
- SCHOLAR
- Merriam-Webster Editors
- CONFIDENCE
- established
- CHRONOLOGY
- Fourteenth century to modern English.
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