Algebraic Notation

This is a notation-history term rather than a word-etymology one, and Wikipedia notes the name “algebraic” may even be a misnomer, since the system has no real connection to algebra. Coordinate labelling of the board is old: a 12th-century French manuscript already labels the files a–h, apparently borrowing the practice from Muslim chess, and Jacob Köbel's Schachzabel Spiel of 1520 used a letters-only system. The recognisable modern ancestor was developed in the 1730s by the Syrian-born player Philipp Stamma, who used the modern square names and was possibly the first to number the ranks. Piece letters were introduced by Moses Hirschel in the 1780s and the modern castling notation by Allgaier and Alexandre in the 1810s. Howard Staunton described the system in The Chess-Player's Handbook (1847), crediting Alexandre, Jaenisch and the Handbuch des Schachspiels, though the English-speaking world kept descriptive notation for another century — algebraic became prevalent in English by 1980, and FIDE stopped recognising descriptive notation in 1981.

First documented: 1847 — Howard Staunton, The Chess-Player's Handbook, 1847 (English-language description; the underlying square-naming scheme dates to Stamma in the 1730s and file-lettering to a 12th-century manuscript)