Chess pieces in other languages

• Pawn -- пешка(Peshka), meaning footsoldier. Pretty similar to normal talk, right?
• Rook -- башня(Bashnya) or ладья(Ladya), meaning tower. Since I haven't yet met someone who has a satisfactory explanation of what the word rook means, we'll assume that tower is a pretty close translation -- that is, after all, what the piece looks like.
• Knight -- конь(Kon), meaning horse.
• King -- король(Korol), meaning King. This is perhaps somewhat illogical, considering the Russian equivalent of the king is the czar.
• Bishop -- слон(Slon), meaning elephant. This is where the meanings begin to diverge. Elephant is, of course, what the name of the piece was in the original incarnation of the game, and certainly makes more sense than Bishop; you don't see the Pope commanding an army (well, not anymore, at least; in medieval times, them Popes were go-getters).
• Queen -- ферзь(Pherz), which has no Russian meaning other than the name for the chess piece itself, but sounds an awful lot like Vizier. The Vizier is, of course, the advisor to the king in Persia. Again, this is likely closer to the original meaning, and makes more sense than having the Queen of a country being the most powerful military figure in it (Unless you're living in 16th century England).

There are other, differing names for the pieces. The Queen is often just called the Queen, but this is considered incorrect and in poor taste. The Bishop, according to my grandmother, may have been called the officer at certain times.

Also noteworthy is the name for check in Russian. Check is called Shakh, checkmate Shakh-Mat, and the game is consequently called Shakhmaty. Shakh is also the Russian for Shah (i.e. the title of the king of a Middle-Eastern country). Coincidence? I think not, though I can't come up with a logical explanation for why this is what check would be called. On the other hand, there is also no logical explanation for why check is called check, either.

Chess Etymology! What could be cooler?

In Hebrew check-mate is also referred to as "Shah-mat." Shah has no real meaning in Hebrew that I've come across and logically should just mean "shah", but "mat" is extremely close to "met" - dead.

In the British television series Dr. Who, towards the end of the last episode of Marco Polo, Kublai Kahn tells the Doctor (William Hartnell) that shah-mat means "the king is dead." I can only assume the BBC did their research before writing this into the script given that they tried to remain as true to history as possible with the Marco Polo story.

Hebrew names for the chess pieces vary only slightly from the Western format.

• Pawn -- hayal, meaning soldier (or peon - meaning peasant or common soldier*).
• Rook -- tzariah, meaning turret.
• Knight -- soos, meaning horse in colloquial Hebrew, more correctly parash, meaning horseman*.
• Bishop -- ratz, meaning runner for whatever obscure reason.
• Queen -- malka, meaning queen.
• King -- melech, meaning king.

There are two possible explanations for the similarities between the Hebrew and the Russian. One is that the huge Russian immigrations of chessmasters to Israel have influenced the game terminology. Another is that Jews in the diaspora borrowed terminology from Persian. Probably the final answer is a little of both.

The word "check" is probably used in English as a sign the other player should check and see he has no squares available to escape to with his king. "Mate" is an English term from shipping referring to a sailor, which has passed from this profession into the common tongue as a word for friend or common man.

* Thanks go to DejaMorgana for pointing this out.

A huge table presenting the words for chess, check, and each chess piece in 59 languages can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Metro/9154/nap-pieces.htm

The meaning of rook is explained there as coming from the Sanskrit word ratha (chariot) which through Persian and Arabic became rukh. It is also noted that the only language other than English to use a direct transliteration of this word is Icelandic, with hrókur

Interestingly, while Russian uses the word Slon (meaning elephant as noted in dimroed's writeup) for the Bishop, the only other Slavic languages in the table that also use this word appear to be Belorussian and Ukranian. From what I can see, the remaining Slavic languages use:

Hunter

• Croatian: lovac
• Macedonian: lovec (ловец)
• Serbian: lovac (ловац)

Marksman

• Czech: střelec
• Slovak: strelec

Other

• Polish uses goniec which seems to translate to runner--like Hebrew as noted by jonmos.


• Slovenian uses tekač, which I haven't been able to find a translation for, but I suspect means either hunter or marksman given the language's general closeness to Slovak and Croatian.


• I'm pretty sure that the Bulgarian word transliterated in the table as ofitser (офицер) means officer as dimroed's grandmother suggests the bishop may have been called occasionally in Russian. According to the footnotes on the page, the Bishop is also called "frits" colloquially in Bulgaria, which is what they used to call German soldiers (derived from the name Fritz, of course).

By the way, the table lists the word dama as the Croatian term for the Queen, but in my experience the word kraljica (queen) is much more common. I think that dama is used only in Croatian chess notation to avoid confusion with the word kralj (king), since it already uses the letter 'K'.

As for the etymology of the word chess, I've found at least two pages that seem to confirm the suggestions above. Namely, chess comes from shah, the Persian word for king, and shah mat means "the king is dead".

rischi says:

"shah" and "mat" are also the words used in hindi/urdu while playing chess respectively for "check" and "mate". "mat" doesn't mean death, however, it means "defeat", "maut" means "death".