The Exchange
The material difference between a rook and a minor piece (bishop or knight).
Winning the exchange means gaining a rook for a bishop or knight; the side with the extra exchange usually has a material advantage, though the size of that advantage depends on the position.
Etymology
This is one of the few glossary terms in this batch with a hard printed first citation. Chess historian Edward Winter raised the question of when the phrase winning the exchange first appeared, and why the word exchange was used at all, in Chess Note 7208. In Chess Note 7211, Robert John McCrary answered with page 7 of A New Treatise on Chess by George Walker (London, 1833), which states that you are said to win the Exchange when you gain a rook for a bishop or knight. Chess Note 7226 then traced the parallel Italian term qualita back further, to page 24 and the note on page 25 of Lolli's Osservazioni teorico-pratiche sopra il giuoco degli scacchi (Bologna, 1763), where a line is said to win at least a Qualita. The German Qualitaet and French qualite belong to that same Romance-derived family, which explains why continental languages call the rook-for-minor-piece margin a quality rather than an exchange. Wikipedia's glossary preserves the modern English sense as the advantage of a rook over a minor piece.
First documented: 1833 — George Walker, A New Treatise on Chess (London, 1833), p. 7, quoted in Edward Winter, Chess Notes item 7211
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.