Check this out.

From check marks to wellness checks to checking your privilege, the Shah of Persia gave us all our check-related words.

Think how many different ways the word “check” is used in English. You can check your oil. You can check facts. You can check your pockets. You can check off items on your to-do list. You can check a coat in the checkroom. If you play hockey, you can check an opponent (though cross-checking is frowned upon). You can check your worst impulses or check your privilege. You can write a check. You can make check marks. If you are composing a constitution, you can institute checks and balances. At a restaurant, you can ask your server to bring the check to your table, which might be covered with a checked tablecloth.

Often a word with so many and such diverse uses turns out to be two or more words from two or more sources, but as far as I can tell, all of these “checks” derive from the chess term “checkmate,” which derives from Persian.

The precursor to chess was invented in India more than 1500 years ago. It was called Proto-Indo-Chessopean.* Not really; it was called chaturanga, a Sanskrit word that referred to the four kinds of pieces used—elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers—which correspond to the rooks, knights, bishops, and pawns of modern-day chess. (The yoga pose chaturanga also refers to a tetrad, the four limbs of the body.)

The game soon made its way to Persia, the Arab world, and from there to Europe. In Persian, the king was known as the Shah, a title that will be familiar to anyone who knows about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The goal of chess, of course, is to entrap the king. In Persian, the winner of a chess match declares “shah mat,” or “the king is astonished” (possibly “the king is dead”). Shah mat came into Old French as eschec mat. In English, eschec mat became checkmate. And from there came all of the check-related words in English.

The word chess itself comes from eschec—or, rather, the plural eschecs, referring to the pieces used to play. The Old French word for the board was eschequier, hence the word checkerboard, for both the pattern and for the board itself, as well as the name of the game checkers.

In the UK, the Treasury used to be known as the Exchequer; the senior minister of the British Treasury is still known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The name came from a checkerboard cloth that was spread over a counting table in the era of the Norman kings of England. Because the cloth looked like a chessboard, it was known as the escheker. The x got added in later, on the (incorrect) assumption that it had a Latin origin. The qu-, I suppose, was a nod to the French origins of the word. This sort of thing happened a lot when 18th-century pedants and dictionary-makers started to standardize English spelling, which had been pretty wild and woolly in previous centuries. In Shakespeare’s day, or Milton’s, there were no spelling bees, nor could there have been. When it came to spelling, everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In chess, to put a king “in check” is to restrain the king’s movements, or to put the king under your control, or, you might say, to stop the king cold. A lot of our uses of check grow out of these senses. You can see how keeping your emotions in check, implementing checks and balances, and even a hockey player checking another player’s progress by slamming him into a wall are related to this idea of putting a king in check.

Phrases like checking up on somebody, checking one’s work, checking for quality, checking in, etc, all seem to be related to maintaining a sense of control and/or surveillance, of holding one accountable or even in some way limiting one’s freedom, the way that a king in check is limited, controlled, kept under watch, not free to do as he pleases. I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything sinister or overly control-freakish about checking your oil or checking your pockets for your keys or even checking a student’s test answers. But those softer uses of the word are still about keeping an eye on things, which is connected however distantly to controlling things.

What about the checks you write on your bank account? (Or, if you’re a Brit, the cheques you write on your bank account…yall are having a hard time letting go of that exchequer.) Etymonline suggests that the connection is with the sense of stopping or hindering: a bank check is a “means of detecting or exposing or preventing error; a check against forgery or alteration.” I don’t suppose I’m qualified to disagree with Etymonline, but it seems worth considering the possibility that a check is like a checker, insofar as it is a token standing for something else. This idea of a check as a token seems especially relevant to a use like “coat check” or “checked baggage.” To be given a claim check in Saint Louis and trade it for a bag in San Francisco feels a lot like the exchange that happens with a bank check.

We don’t owe a lot of words to the Persian language, but check is surely the most significant. Paradise and cummerbund come in at a distant second and third.

*This was supposed to be a joke about Proto-Indo-European. In future, I’ll try to do better.

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Lanta Davis beholds.

Lanta Davis is a professor of humanities and literature in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. Her new book is Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation. In this episode, Dr. Davis and I talk about the perhaps counterintuitive truth that neglecting to engage our imagination makes us more susceptible to imaginative influences that we don’t choose. We also talk about the difference between an idol and an icon, and we talk about the role of weirdness in spiritual formation. We also talk about raccoons and unicorns.