What does checkmate mean?

The king is helpless

Māt is a Persian word meaning roughly at a loss, helpless, or defeated. So wrote the chess historian H. J. R. Murray in 1913, adding that the old explanation, that it was the Arabic māta, he died, had been abandoned by scholars. An English etymological dictionary says the same: the king is left helpless, stumped.

The explanation with the dead king lives on all the same, even in some dictionaries. In the game itself, the king never dies. The game ends the moment the king is checkmated, and the king is never captured.

How it reached English

The word went from Persian to Arabic and on to Europe. In Old French the king's check was eschec, and eschec mat was checkmate. English took check around 1300 and checkmate in the mid-14th century. Even chess comes from the same root: the Old French esches, the plural of eschec, meaning chessmen.

Mate on its own, as in "mate in two," comes from the Old French mat too.

Mate as in tired

In many languages the chess word slipped into everyday speech, Murray wrote. The Latin mattus took on meanings like overcome, exhausted, and dead tired. In Swedish, matt still means tired or weak, and the dictionaries trace that sense back to the chessboard.

In other languages

The word is recognizable all over Europe: Schachmatt in German, échec et mat in French, jaque mate in Spanish, and scacco matto in Italian. In Russian, the game itself is called shakhmaty.

The rules of check and checkmate are under checkmate, and the fastest mates have their own entries in the glossary: Scholar's mate and Fool's mate.