Echec

[Matthew Turner]

I am hoping a francophone can help me. We know that "Les echecs" means chess in French, but I found out today that "echec" means failure. Surely this cannot be a coincidence, does anyone know the Etymology?

[Mike Truran]

In English "check" can also mean something similar.

[David Sedgwick]

I'll send an enquiry to IA Laurent Freyd. (Please see http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2674.)

[David Sedgwick]

I'll send an enquiry to IA Laurent Freyd. (Please see http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2674.)

Laurent has sent me an extremely informative reply, which I quote verbatim below. (The link is to an article in French.)

"The article below may answer the question about chess and failure in French :

http://www.ccdmd.qc.ca/correspo/Corr15- ... sites.html

Apparently the 2 usages of the same word "échec" come from 2 different sources. The chess word comes from Arabic as we know and the one associated with failure would rather come from "échoir", from Latin or Norman "escouar". That latter is linked to naval vocabulary "échoir", when touching the ground under the water by accident."

[Richard Haddrell]

I think Laurent has read the article hastily. It remarks in passing that échouer (to fail) is a different word from échec, but does not suggest that the modern senses of échec are unrelated. On the contrary:

“The word échec is originally the chess player’s warning to his opponent that his king is threatened. As early as the 13th century the word’s meaning has passed, via the situation of the threatened king, to the figurative sense of ‘obstacle, difficulty’..., then, by extension, to that of ‘setback’ or ‘failure’.”

The chess sense and the ‘setback’ sense are also, of course, one and the same word in English. The notion (now happily unknown among chess players) that checking your opponent’s king is a kind of triumph is reflected very early in both languages.