Bullet Chess

Bullet is an English word of French descent: it appears in the 1550s meaning cannonball, from French boulette, a diminutive of boule meaning ball, and takes the firearm-projectile sense in the 1570s. In chess it names the fastest time controls, defined by Wikipedia as games where each player has less than three minutes for the whole game, in contrast with blitz at ten minutes or less and rapid at more than ten but less than sixty. The Glossary of chess likewise carries bullet chess as a headword. Yasser Seirawan's foreword to Bullet Chess: One Minute to Mate by Hikaru Nakamura and Bruce Harper (Russell Enterprises, 2009) describes the practice emerging informally among speed-chess players who cut five-minute games to three and then to one minute, calling the one-minute games bullet, and notes that over-the-board bullet was chaotic until internet chess servers made it practical. Who first applied the word bullet to one-minute chess, and when, is not established by any source fetched here.

First documented: n.a. — n.a. - no dated first use of bullet in the chess sense found; Winter's Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms has no entry