Discovered Attack
A tactic revealed when one piece moves out of the way, unmasking an attack from a piece that was blocked behind it.
The moving piece can make its own threat independently while the newly revealed piece attacks a second target, effectively creating two threats at once for the price of one move.
Etymology
"Discovered attack" preserves an older sense of the English verb "discover" — to un-cover or unmask, rather than to find something previously unknown — describing precisely what happens when a piece moves away and "un-covers" the attack of the piece standing behind it on the same line. The term is widely believed to be a direct translation of the French échec à la découverte ("check by uncovering"), reflecting the same French-language influence on chess procedural vocabulary seen in en passant and j'adoube. The tactic itself is ancient: 16th-century Italian master Gioachino Greco described what he called "unmasking moves" in a manuscript from around 1620, and it became a signature weapon of 19th-century attacking players such as Adolf Anderssen, most famously in his 1852 "Evergreen Game," and Mikhail Chigorin, who built entire opening systems around discovered-check threats.
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.