Opening
The initial phase of a chess game, typically the first several moves, focused on development and king safety.
In the opening, players develop their pieces, contest the center, and prepare to castle. Well-studied opening sequences are recorded in opening theory and often follow named lines.
Etymology
The English noun opening descends from Old English openung, the act of making open, and had acquired the general sense of the action of beginning something by 1712. In chess it names the initial stage of the game, and its usage as a named body of study is older than the word's abstract sense: systematic analysis of opening play appears in Luis Ramirez de Lucena's work of 1497, Pedro Damiano's of 1512 and Ruy Lopez de Segura's of 1561. Openings were studied much more scientifically from the 1840s onward. The nomenclature of individual openings developed haphazardly, drawing on players, places and pieces, and most names were in use before FIDE issued a standardising booklet in 1933. The modern reference framework is the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, which assigns 500 codes from A00 to E99. Etymonline's entry does not supply a dated first attestation of the specifically chess sense, so no chess-specific year is claimed here.
First documented: n.a. — n.a. for the word in its chess sense; the earliest surviving systematic analysis of chess openings is Lucena (1497)
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.