J'adoube

J'adoube is French for "I adjust," from je ("I") and adouber, a verb now obsolete in French outside this one chess context. Historically, adouber referred to adoubement, the medieval ceremony of knighting a young noble and equipping him with arms; by the 18th century the meaning had drifted to a more general "to equip" or "to arrange," and from there narrowed further, in chess specifically, to "adjust." The earliest documented English use of the phrase appears in J.H. Sarratt's A Treatise on the Game of Chess (London, 1808), which specifies that a player who has touched a piece must move it "unless, at the moment of touching it, he should say 'J'adoube.'" That English chess etiquette adopted a French phrase at all reflects the broader 18th- and 19th-century vogue in Britain for sprinkling continental French terms into games and polite conversation alike — chess historian Edward Winter notes contemporaries who "played a 'partie,' took 'en passant,' and did the 'j'adoube'" specifically because plain English felt too vulgar for the occasion.