Hold the board at the last moment of a game. The king is being attacked, and every door is shut at once: no safe square to step to, no way to take the attacking piece, nothing to put in between. Nobody actually picks the king up — the game simply stops, because there is no move left that changes anything. That is the picture the whole word carries: not being knocked down, but being left with nowhere to go.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces checkmate through Middle English chekmat and Old French eschec mat to Arabic and Classical Persian šāh māt, the king is amazed, or stunned. The old phrase already holds the modern picture: the king is not captured, he is frozen.
Wiktionary 記載這個字經中古英文 chekmat、古法文 eschec mat,上溯到阿拉伯文與古典波斯文的 šāh māt,意思是「王愣住了」。這個古老的說法裡已經有了今天的畫面:王沒有被抓走,是動彈不得。
Wiktionary (kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:237888520:33417), etymology_text supplied in the evidence packet
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原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,摘錄並精簡格式,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
checkmateintj/ˈt͡ʃɛkmeɪt/
- 1
board-gameschessgamesWord called out by the victor when making a move that wins the game.
- 2
Said when one has placed a person in a losing situation with no escape.
checkmatenoun/ˈt͡ʃɛkmeɪt/
- 1
board-gameschessgamesThe conclusive victory in a game of chess that occurs when an opponent's king is threatened with unavoidable capture.
- This immediately ends the game, provided that the move producing the checkmate position was in accordance with Article 3 and Articles 4.2 – 4.7.
- 2
Any losing situation with no escape; utter defeat.
checkmateverb/ˈt͡ʃɛkmeɪt/
- 1
board-gameschessgamesTo put the king of an opponent into checkmate.
- My opponent checkmated me in four moves!
- The game is won by the player who has checkmated his/her opponent’s king.
- 2
To place in a losing situation that has no escape.
- Where is it? What does SCP-3125 look like? Its motivation, its origins, its modus operandi— how much of that can be known? Does it have to be known, to solve the problem? Does it matter how intelligent the intelligence is, once it's inside the box, once it's checkmated?
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary,已精簡格式;依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用,改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。