Chess Pieces in Different Languages: King, Queen, Rook, Knight, Pawn

Kings, viziers, elephants and chariots

Chess reached Europe from Persia by way of the Arabic game shatranj, and the names of the pieces still show the route. Persian calls the game شطرنج (šatranj) and the king شاه (šâh); Arabic says شطرنج (šaṭranǧ). Sanskrit, at the start of the line, has चतुरङ्गक्रीडा (čaturaṅgakrīḍā), and Kannada and Tamil keep the old army name as ಚದುರಂಗ (čaduraṃga) and சதுரங்கம் (caturaṅkam).

The queen began as a counsellor, the ferz or vizier of shatranj.¹ Many languages from Russia to India kept that figure: Russian ферзь (ferz'), Persian فرزین (farzin) beside وزیر (vazir), Hindi वज़ीर (vazīr), Turkish vezir, Uzbek farzin. West of that line it became a lady or a queen, as in French dame, Dutch dame, Italian donna or regina, Spanish dama or reina, German Dame. Polish keeps both, hetman and dama.

The bishop was an elephant in shatranj, and in much of Asia and Eastern Europe it still is: Russian слон (slon), Arabic فيل (fīl), Turkish fil, Persian فیل (fil), Malay gajah and Indonesian gajah. Spanish alfil carries the Arabic name over directly.¹ Elsewhere the piece got a new identity: a runner in German Läufer and Hungarian futó, a fool in French fou, an archer in Czech střelec and Slovak strelec, an officer in Bulgarian офицер (oficer) and Albanian oficeri.

The rook is the chariot of the Persian word rukh.¹ Most European languages see a tower in it: torre in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, Turm in German, wieża in Polish. Russian calls it ладья (lad'ja), a boat, and in Hindi it is हाथी (hātʰī), an elephant,¹ with Marathi हत्ती (hattī) beside it; Thai lists two names, เรือ (rʉa) and ปราสาท (prāsāt).

The tables follow language families. Each row gives the name of the game, then the six pieces from king to pawn. Languages written in more than one script, such as Serbian, Bosnian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tatar or Uzbek, have a row per script, and a romanised row follows each non-Latin one. Belarusian appears twice: once with the common set and once with an older set of names (візыр, афіцэр, вершнік, латнік).

Pion, Bauer, peón: the pawn and the queen in many languages

The pawn shows how differently languages imagine the foot soldier. French, Dutch, West Frisian, Limburgish, Romanian, Occitan, Indonesian and Javanese say pion, Serbian and Bosnian list it beside pešak and pješak; Spanish and Asturian have peón, Portuguese peão, Catalan peó. German Bauer and Low German Buer make it a farmer, and so do Danish, Norwegian and Swedish bonde and Slovenian kmet. Albanian ushtari, Maltese suldat and Tagalog kawal are soldiers, and Hindi प्यादा (pyādā), Urdu پیادہ (piyādâ) and Persian پیاده (piyâde) share one word with Punjabi ਪਿਆਦਾ (piādā).

For the queen, dama is the word across much of Southern and Eastern Europe: Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Asturian, Romansh, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Basque and Interlingua dama, Czech and Slovak dáma, Latvian dāma. Several languages list it next to an older royal title, so the Spanish cell reads dama; reina and the Polish one hetman; dama.