Blockade

The chess term takes a siege-warfare word and applies it to a pawn. Etymonline dates the noun blockade to the 1690s in the sense of the shutting up of a place by hostile ships or troops, with the verb from the 1670s, and connects it to French blocus and to the verb block, borrowed in the 1590s from French bloquer, from Old French bloc meaning a log or block of wood. In chess the word was made into a system by Nimzowitsch: Wikipedia's biography lists the blockading of opposing pieces, notably passed pawns, among his central concepts, records that he wrote Die Blockade, meaning The Blockade, in 1925, and quotes his formulation first restrain, then blockade and finally destroy, illustrated by his 1926 game against Paul Johner. The German text of Die Praxis meines Systems at nimzowitsch.net shows the paired concepts in its table of contents, with a chapter headed 2. Hemmung und Blockade, that is, restraint and blockade. Wikipedia's glossary defines the chess blockade as the placement of a piece directly in front of an enemy pawn where it obstructs the pawn's advance and hinders the movements of other enemy pieces, notes that the blockaded pawn shelters the blockader, says the tactic is most effective against passed or isolated pawns, and identifies the knight as the ideal blockader.

First documented: 1925 for Nimzowitsch's monograph on the chess concept; the English word dates from the 1690s per Etymonline — Aron Nimzowitsch, Die Blockade (1925), per Wikipedia