Zeitnot (Time Trouble)

Zeitnot is an unadapted borrowing from German, formed from Zeit meaning time and Not meaning need, distress or emergency; the German dictionary DWDS defines it as the difficult or pressed situation that arises from a lack of time. English chess uses it for the state of having very little time left on the clock before the time control, and Wikipedia's Glossary of chess glosses it explicitly as from German, time need. Wikipedia's Time control article uses Zeitnot in the same sense. Wiktionary records the chess sense as an unadapted German borrowing and gives as its earliest quotation a 1 August 2010 article by Matan Prilleltensky, Learning From Your Losses, for the United States Chess Federation. That 2010 citation is a dictionary quotation rather than a genuine first use: the word is far older in German chess writing, but neither DWDS nor Edward Winter's Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms supplies a first attestation.

First documented: n.a. (earliest English quotation cited by Wiktionary is 2010) — n.a.; Wiktionary's earliest quotation is Matan Prilleltensky, Learning From Your Losses, US Chess Federation, 1 August 2010