Kibitz
/ˈkɪbɪts/To watch a chess game as a spectator and offer unsolicited advice or commentary, often unwelcome.
A person who kibitzes is a "kibitzer." The term is common at chess clubs and skittles rooms, where onlookers frequently comment on games in progress, sometimes to the players' irritation.
Etymology
Kibitz entered English in 1915 from Yiddish kibitsen, "to offer gratuitous advice as an outsider," which itself came from German kiebitzen, "to look on at cards." Both trace to Kiebitz, the German name for the lapwing or peewit, a shore bird with a long folk reputation as a meddler or busybody, possibly because of its harsh, attention-grabbing cry. An alternative theory traces the word instead to Rotwelsch, a historical German criminal argot, where related forms meant "to search" or "to inspect" rather than deriving from the bird name at all. Whichever root is correct, the chess-specific usage is old: a chess journal published in Vienna in 1855 already describes a gawking crowd of "kibitzen" watching games at a popular café, showing the word's association with chess spectators predates its broader adoption into general English by roughly sixty years.
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.