Checkmate
/ˈtʃɛkmeɪt/The winning condition: a check from which the opposing king cannot escape, ending the game.
Once a player is checkmated, the game ends immediately — the king is never actually removed from the board. Checkmate is the ultimate goal of every chess game, taking absolute priority over material or positional advantage.
Etymology
"Checkmate" comes from the Persian phrase shāh māt, most accurately translated as "the king is helpless" or "stumped" — not, as popularly believed, "the king is dead." That grimmer reading was added later, when the phrase passed into Arabic and the word māt was reinterpreted through an Arabic root associated with dying, even though the original Persian māt simply meant baffled or at a loss. The phrase traveled from Sanskrit chaturanga's underlying concepts, through Persian shatranj as shāh māt, into Arabic, and then into Old French as échec et mat, finally giving English "checkmate" by around 1300. The lingering association with death nonetheless persists in some modern languages — most notably Russian, whose word for chess itself, shakhmaty, preserves the same root and carries connotations of regicide that the original Persian phrase never actually intended.
Translations
| Language | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic | كش ملك (kash malik) | Modern Arabic phrasing ("check [on the] king"); historically shah mat directly. |
| Dutch | schaakmat loanword | |
| French | échec et mat loanword | Literally "check and mate" — the French phrase English's "checkmate" is calqued from. |
| German | Schachmatt loanword | |
| Italian | scacco matto loanword | |
| Polish | mat loanword | |
| Portuguese | xeque-mate loanword | |
| Russian | мат (mat) loanword | Short form; the full shakh i mat is also used. |
| Spanish | jaque mate loanword | |
| Turkish | şah mat loanword |