Skewer

Unlike most chess tactical vocabulary, the term "skewer" has a precisely documented single inventor and date: chess historian Edward Winter traces it to Edgar Pennell, a teacher at Salisbury Road School in Liverpool in the late 1930s. Pennell taught the tactic to his students using the everyday word skewer — the pointed rod used to hold pieces of food together while cooking — because the tactic pierces through two pieces along one line just as a cooking skewer pierces through several pieces of food. The coinage spread quickly: contemporaries recalled adult bystanders at the 1937 British Chess Federation Congress in Blackpool being puzzled by schoolboys using the strange new word in conversation. Before Pennell's coinage, the same idea had no single settled name in English and was often described, awkwardly, as a "bishop fork." The everyday word skewer itself is of likely Scandinavian origin, from Old Norse skífa, "a cut or slice."