How did the chess pieces get their names? | Hacker News Reader

How did the chess pieces get their names?

atlasobscura.com

162 pointsBrajeshwar78 comments

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No discussion of chess piece names would be complete without mentioning Uel Aramcheck's Forbidden Chess Pieces:

The Prophet, who is aware of the hands which move the pieces.

The Crows, placed on the board after the final turn.

And many more: https://twitter.com/thepatanoiac/status/439992435205083136?l...

Ha ha.

On an only slightly more series note, "fairy chess" has a number of alternative chess pieces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_chess

Amazon = queen + knight

Chancellor = rook + knight

Crowned Rook = rook + king

Camel = knight that moves 1,3

Grasshopper = queen, but must jump over a piece and lands immediately past it

Nightrider = knight, but moves unlimited in the same direction

and many, many more

Ha ha.

This is a great link to wiki - I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Thank you!

> Chancellor = rook + knight

I believe this piece goes by the name "Knook" in some online circles.

Oh man. I have never wanted accompanying illustrations for anything more.

That tweet is unfortunately invisible to me.

There is some in-country variation that's ignored in this article. In Poland, names of pieces will vary based on family you come from (as this game is usually learnt at kindergarten age from your parents/grandparents). For example, in my family we refer to the knight as "koń" (horse) rather than "skoczek" (jumper), and instead of using the more Polish-sounding "goniec" for the bishop we use "laufer" borrowed from German. Also, even though the official (as in: approved by some chess institutions in the country) name for the queen is "hetman", I'd say 90%+ Poles say "królowa" (literally queen).

German here, next to Springer (jumper) for the bishop in my family “Ross” or “rössl” was used.

That would be a horse, which is seemingly used in some other countries.

Springare is an old word for horse in Swedish. In medieval parlance they would say "bring me my springare" instead of horse.

Springer is used for the knight, Läufer is used for the Bishop.

Oops, of course that is what I meant

>[] I'd say 90%+ Poles say "królowa" (literally queen).

I thought "królowa" is reserved for Mary, Queen of Poles.

Sometimes the term "królówka" is also used within the context of chess.

The problem is that we want names with distinct first letter for the simple chess notation and "horse" and "queen" conflict with "king" and each other.

Unlike knight and king, you mean?

You can’t always get what you want :) Luckily the K in knight is silent so it is a minor leap to denote it with N.

Do you have any source for the 90% figure? Some casual players do indeed use the alternative names, but pretty much everyone I know uses „hetman” for the queen. (I’ve even heard the colloquial abbreviation „heć”.) Literature uses the official names exclusively.

No. I've just made it up. But I've never heard it in my life playing with other people; only when watching Polish grandmasters and other people involved in chess in an official capacity.

That is similar in Hungary, for example the pawn is either a walker or a peasant, and the queen is either a visir or a queen (but it's a ruling queen, királynő, rather than queen consort, királyné, which I find nice :) )

The story I heard about the Queen was that she started off being able to move a single square in each direction[1], but the upgrade to let her move the full diagonals, ranks and files was done as a tribute to Queen Isabella of Spain.

Here’s a source for this although it’s not where I heard it https://medium.com/exploring-history/did-spains-queen-isabel...

[1] Including maybe jumping like a knight but I may have imagined it

I sure hope the knight is not called "calvary" in that many countries as suggested by the legend in the second map. Unless there is a connection between the knight's movements and crucifixion?

Hahahaha good spot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary

My seventh grade teacher pronounced these inversely and the whole class got them “wrong” on a spelling test.

But you learned a valuable lesson

Always look on the bright side of life

Ouch. That was sharp.

Strange he mentions Chinese but not Chinese Chess (Elephant Chess).

In Chinese Chess, more or less all the original names have been retained, whereas they have changed radically in Western chess as discussed.

Chinese chess pieces (and their rough positional but not power equivalents in western chess) are: the General (king), the Advisor (queen), the Elephant (bishop), the Horse (knight), the Chariot (rook), the Soldier (pawn), and famously the Cannon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi

> While it may seem logical that the king has a queen by his side, that’s not how things started out. In the Indian original, this piece was the king’s “counselor” (mantri in Sanskrit). The Arabs used wazir (“vizier,” i.e., the ruler’s minister/secretary), which was Latinized to farzia, which became the French vierge (“virgin”).

Just the other day I was wondering what a stupid name for the Queen's piece. Not at all logical. It's battlefield and not wedding/ceremony for queen to be by-his-side. Vazir is popular piece name in India as well.

In Hindi, Persian and Arabic variations of the game, the bishop piece was referred to as a "camel". I don't know where the author got this concept of "second elephant".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfil

"It was used in standard chess before being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries. [...] The alfil is a very old piece, appearing in some very early chess variants, such as Tamerlane chess and shatranj. It was originally called an elephant, hastīn or gāja in Sanskrit. [...] When chess spread to China, the piece became the elephant in xiangqi. [...] When chess came to Persia from India, the Sanskrit name was translated to pil, and when chess came to the Muslims from Persia, the move had not changed, and then the name changed into Arabic to fil, the already existing cognate to pil which comes from the Akkadian language and ultimately from the Egyptian language. The name thus became fil and then alfil (prefixing the Arabic definite article, al)."

Fairy chess doesn't count though.

"It was used in standard chess before being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries."

The bishop is a modern European invention.

> In Hindi, Persian and Arabic variations of the game, the bishop piece was...

There was no bishop in traditional Hindi, Persian and Arabic variations. There was an elephant though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_(chess)#History

"The bishop's predecessor in medieval chess, shatranj (originally chaturanga), was the alfil, meaning "elephant", which could leap two squares along any diagonal, and could jump over an intervening piece."

> being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries.

> The bishop is a modern European invention.

Actually the Atlas Obscura article shows that only a small portion of Europe adopted bishop. I often consider the English version of Wikipedia as the "universal" one, but this remembers me that it's likely to be biased, instead.

The pieces are mainly defined by their movement - not by their name or shape.

"[A piece that jumps two squares diagonally, leaping over any intermediate piece] was used in standard chess before being replaced by [a piece that moves along diagonals without jumping over intervening pieces] in the 15th and 16th centuries."

Of course whether the name changed or not is relevant for the structure of the wikipedia entries and impacts the degree of detail about the historical evolution.

By the way the English entry for "bishop" also mentions that the elephant-linked naming remains in some languages (and has a table of names/translations in 72 languages with 17 elephants in it):

"Derivatives of alfil survive in the languages of the two countries where chess was first introduced within Western Europe—Italian (alfiere) and Spanish (alfil) [...] In some Slavic languages (e.g. Czech/Slovak) the bishop is called [...] while in others it is still known as "elephant" (e.g. Russian slon)."

> In the Chinese example, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read and understand the same text, even though they use different words for the same concepts.

Written mandarin is different from written Cantonese and the differences are more than simplified vs traditional characters

Yeah, not a good example. Written vernacular mandarin started in the Ming dynasty and more or less was forcefully promoted in the Qing and later Republic of China as _the_ way to write Chinese, meaning other dialects lost out on developing a common written vernacular form. In this example most Cantonese speakers learned mandarin grammar and vocabulary, at least to read and write it.

But did written Chinese not exist before then? Before, the literate people in East Asia used Classical Chinese, which was essentially a similar forced standardization from the dominant vernacular 2000 years ago, very similar to Europe's use of Latin. Issac Newton could read and write Latin because he learned it, not because English naturally gets written as Latin!

Written Cantonese exists, but most Cantonese-speakers write in standard written Chinese (which is what you’re calling “written Mandarin” here), and pronounce the characters in Cantonese, regardless of whether they can speak Mandarin.

100% correct. Cantonese speakers write in Chinese just as Mandarin speakers do (though they pronounce the characters differently). Written Cantonese, as it were, is cobbled together from certain Chinese characters and, of all things, a few English letters: perhaps mostly used nowadays to portray Cantonese dialogue in comic books.

> Written mandarin is different from written Cantonese and the differences are more than simplified vs traditional characters

I understand that this is a heartfelt wish of contemporary cultural independence, but it is simply not true for 99 %+ of Cantonese speakers year 2023.

At least for Spanish, a majority of the maps are utterly wrong.

I don't see how 4 (or more) out of 6 would be wrong. Are you from Spain? Perhaps there's variations in the Spanish speaking world?

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezas_de_ajedrez

The only ones that I might consider off, but not straight up wrong are:

Elephant -> Alfil * (The words originates from arabic for elephant, but it means specifically this piece of chess)

Lady -> Reina/Dama * (You could use either, but the article lists them separately and doesn't recognize Queen, which is the more common of the two)

Similarly, “rook” only means the chess piece in English, but England is labeled as having it mean chariot. So the “alfil” example is consistent.

It's also a species of bird (Corvus frugilegus) but the two senses are unrelated.

> Lady -> Reina/Dama * (You could use either, but the article lists them separately and doesn't recognize Queen, which is the more common of the two)

I think the reason is that the article follows the FIDE rules rather than colloquial use.

I was about the comment something similar about Dutch, where the word for Queen (“Koningin”) is also more common than the official FIDE-term Lady (“Dame”). I suspect the reason for this choice is that the FIDE also establishes an official chess notation where each piece has a single letter abbreviation. In Dutch this presents the problem that “Koning” (King) is a prefix of “Koningin” (Queen), so it makes sense to abbreviate king with K, but it's not clear what letter to assign to the Queen. It makes sense then to switch to “Dame” and use the letter D for this piece.

I think the same thing applies to Romance languages where the words for King and Queen derive from the Latin words Rex and Regina (Roi and Reine in French, Rey and Reina in Spanish, etc.), all of which start with the letter 'R'. Then switching to Lady (dame/dama) for the Queen makes sense just to create a unique letter.

So, contrary to the "reasonably educated people play chess" trope, I do not play chess and was quite ignorant of it. During a programming job interview, I was presented with what is apparently a sample problem of moving around a piece. I had to ask how the piece "moved" but didn't get the name.

Although the problem was easy, I still remember the interviewer flinching slightly each time I called it "the horsey piece."

In the Indian version it's called raja(king) mantri/senapati(queen) camel(bishop) elephant(rook) horse(knight) soldier (pawn)

FWIW I've found Atlas Obscura to be flat out wrong on some stuff.

In Norwegian the knight is called "springer", as mentioned in the article, but many call it "hest" ("horse") too. They are both valid names.

The translation of "springer" is a bit imprecise. Instead of simply "jumper", it describes a "human or animal that can jump". A horse fits that description well

"Springer" is actually sometimes used to describe a knight's horse instead of the most common word. So "springer" has connections to both horse and knight.

Can you cite some example articles? It's a for-profit Series-B startup [0] in an ever-worsening digital publishing market [1] and article sourcing is paid writers not peer-reviewed crowdsourced, so I expect parts might be worse than Wikipedia, and certainly have very selective coverage. But at first glance I didn't see any glaring errors. Also I expect they won't have an openly exposed peer-review editing process, so if an article turns out to be bad they might delete or hide it (but I can't find any such).

[0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/atlas-obscura

[1]: 1/2023 "Atlas Obscura wants to be profitable before raising funds in a tricky media market" https://digiday.com/media/atlas-obscura-wants-to-be-profitab...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tikal-howler-monkeys

> According to the sacred book of creation myths, the Popol Vuh, primates were a life form that had arisen during one of the many earlier experimental periods of creation by the gods.

> According to the myth, the gods were ultimately disappointed with the result, which they found to be too frivolous and rebellious and thus strove to perfect and shape the form of some of the monkeys.

Maybe "flat out wrong" was too harsh. But I don't think this is exactly right. The earlier attempt were men made out of wood, who almost all drowned in a great flood. The few survivors turned into monkeys. The second attempt at man was made out of maize, and those survived to become humans.

But I don't think there's anything about the gods being displeased because the first creation were monkeys. Monkeys from what I understand were more of a byproduct.

I'd say that was one minor error in one article (10 paragraphs, 24 sentences) of their ~25K articles.

It's not even that that single article is "flat out wrong": only that paragraph (and maybe the heading). Can you cite any other article as being wrong?

AO looks more reliable than Wikipedia (obviously much lower coverage).

Yeah maybe I was too harsh. But I only knew that because I'm writing a book that features Mesoamerica and my factchecker told me it was wrong. Which made me think there may be other things that are wrong that I don't have access to an expert on.

> the piece not only acquired a new, female identity but also greater powers.

There's w0ke media for you. Changing existing characters into "strong female leads", making them OP for no reason... Unacceptable!

(/s)

Sort of. The piece is the second ranked member of the court.

In the East, that's the vizir. In the West, that's the queen.

The game reflected the culture that surrounded it. (E.g. elephant -> bishop)

What is a knight? Did they mean horsey?

You must be from England :)

A small nitpick: the rook from the original game was a mythical bird of prey called Rukh/Roc. The chess piece was a bird. It became a tower later. So, the theory is birds were often used as figureheads on boats, that's why it is called a boat in Turkey/Russia.

Also the other, outdated name (but still in use) for a rook in Russian is "Тура"/Tura, which is of course a (siege) tower.

> the rook from the original game was a mythical bird of prey called Rukh/Roc. The chess piece was a bird.

That doesn't seem to be the mainstream explanation: the original piece in the game would be a chariot -thought the connection with the name rukh is not clear- and the alternative bird representation would have been an Arab innovation.

----

OF RUKHS AND ROOKS, CAMELS AND CASTLES

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Remke-Kruk/publication/...

Huh. Of course, a rook is a species of bird.

But an unrelated one, the roc of eastern mythology was a giant bird of prey told to be able to carry away elephants.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roc_(mythology)

I can't be sure the rooks in your area don't do that, but I guess they don't.

I'm not sure either

While is true that the Queen is technically called Donna (=Woman, Lady) in italian, most of people call the piece Regina (=Queen)

I suspect every time the article says "why's that so? nobody knows!", somebody actually knows and they would have found out if they had researched a little...

https://archive.is/KXW8u

Has this been written by an AI? All what it says about Spanish names is wrong.

While attempting to read the article I was constantly battered by advertising. I could not complete the article.

As usual, uBlock Origin with Firefox solves these issues. Although even with uBlock turned off Firefox's built-in tracking protection kills all ads except or one (for a book published by the website).

I'm guessing the only people on Hacker News who still see ads are the people in the ad industry and iOS users that hate Safari and are prevented from getting proper ad blocking in other browsers.

How do you get an ad blocker in Safari on iOS?

By searching the App Store for “ad blocker for safari”. There are loads.

Why would you think so? I’m in none of those categories and still see ads.

By choice? Or are you in some other kind of constrained environment?

I don't have any ad-blocker installed and only see 2 ads at the very beginning of the article. Not ideal but far from constantly battering. Using Chrome on Android.

Author doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The knight is a knight because its L-shaped movement represents a flanking maneuver, which cavalry is good at.

Most of them seemed pretty reasonable, but yeah the knight bit was a bit off odd.

> From the very beginning of chaturanga, this piece—originally called asva, Sanskrit for “horse”—has firmly maintained its equine association. Of course, this is likely because it is the only piece that is able to jump over the heads of the other pieces.

Of course, the common battle tactic of flanking via leaping your horse over the other side’s lines. A very real and widespread thing that occurred in every culture that had chess.

But in many countries, it isn't a knight.

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