820 canonical forms + 578 route stages.
THE TIMELINE ATLAS
JOURNEY ATLAS ↗FORM / ROUTE / BOUND
1398 REVIEWED EVENTSLANGUAGE
IN TIME.
One cross-word chronology for every defensibly bounded form and journey stage—without converting a vague historical label into a fake year.
A reviewed graph bound, not a claim of an earliest human word.
Only stages with directly cited numeric bounds enter this atlas.
Labels remain visible in Journey Atlas, but not parsed into false years.
005 MATCHING EVENTS
FILTER THE CHRONOLOGY
WHEN DID THE EVIDENCE LAND?
TWO CLOCKS.
NO FALSE PRECISION.
FORM CHRONOLOGY dates a canonical linguistic form or reconstruction in the lexical graph.
ROUTE CHRONOLOGY dates a geographic or transmission stage in a word’s journey.
They can share an era band, but they are never silently treated as the same kind of claim.
CROSS-WORD CHRONOLOGY / EARLIEST BOUND FIRST
THE EVIDENCE IN TIME
Medieval4 ON THIS PAGE
500 CE–599 CEcentury
ROUTE STAGENorthern Indian game tradition
chess
6th c. first-certain caturaṅga evidence
The first certain caturaṅga game-name evidence belongs to a sixth-century Indian military-game tradition; earlier origin stories remain less secure.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The sixth century is the source’s first-certain documentary horizon, not an exact invention date or one point of origin.
AUDIT RECORD ↗1300 CE →open
ROUTE STAGEEnglish-language and international chess nomenclature
chess
14th c. English game name onward; later global adoption
The inherited English game name persists while rules change and chess becomes global. The unrelated grass called chess remains a separate word of unknown origin.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
The open interval begins with the cited fourteenth-century English game-name horizon. It does not date worldwide adoption or every rule change to that century.
AUDIT RECORD ↗1300 CE–1399 CEcentury
ROUTE STAGEFrench game name and Middle English chess
chess
14th c. English first-known-use horizon; French route earlier
French plural escheks or eschez, literally the chess “checks,” becomes Middle English chesse, ches, or esches. Persian-to-European game transmission predates the English record.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
The numeric bound records the cited fourteenth-century English first-use horizon only; it does not date the earlier French formation or every European transmission event.
AUDIT RECORD ↗1400 CE–1699 CErange
ROUTE STAGEEuropean chess culture
checkmate
15th–17th centuries
European chess rules changed substantially from the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries, while the checkmate victory term persisted.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The broad 1400–1699 interval contains the source's mid-fifteenth-century queen reform and early-seventeenth-century castling reform without inventing exact years.
AUDIT RECORD ↗Early modern1 ON THIS PAGE
1500 CE →open
ROUTE STAGEGlobal English
king
king as monarch and extended supremacy term
The inherited title expands into chess, cards, checkers, preeminence, and verbal uses while remaining the ordinary monarch word.
1 EVIDENCE LINK
The modern-language anchor is conventional; the reviewed source does not license exact first dates for every surviving sense.
AUDIT RECORD ↗UNBOUNDED IS
A REAL RESULT.
Stages without source-backed numeric bounds stay in their complete Journey Atlas route, carry an explicit temporal note, and remain absent here until the evidence supports normalization. The missing point is visible work—not permission to guess.