Counter-Gambit

The head word gambit comes from Italian gambetto, the act of tripping someone with the leg to make them fall, from gamba meaning leg, from Late Latin gamba, a horse's hock or leg. The Spanish word gambito was first applied to chess openings in 1561 by Ruy Lopez de Segura, from the Italian wrestling expression dare il gambetto, to put a leg forward in order to trip someone; the French spelling gambit then shaped the English form. English first records it in Francis Beale's 1656 translation of a Gioachino Greco manuscript, The Royall Game of Chesse-play, advertised as illustrated with almost one hundred Gambetts, with the modern non-chess figurative sense first recorded in 1855. Countergambit prefixes counter-, meaning in return or in opposition, to this root: Wikipedia notes that a gambit employed by Black is sometimes named a countergambit, giving the Albin Countergambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e5) and the Greco Countergambit, the original name for the Latvian Gambit, as examples. A stricter definition restricts the term to a gambit offered by Black in reply to a gambit by White, which fits the Albin and Falkbeer but not the Latvian. No source located in this session gives a separate first attestation date for the compound countergambit.

First documented: n.a. for countergambit; 1561 for the chess application of gambit and 1656 for its first English appearance — n.a. for countergambit; Ruy Lopez de Segura (1561) for gambito, and Francis Beale, The Royall Game of Chesse-play (1656) for the English word gambit