Chess: a game for two players with 16 pieces each on a board of 64 squares. The board is called chessboard (or checkerboard).
The suggested origins of the game are legion. China, Persian and India have all been mentioned as the original home. The antiquity of the game has been put so far back as five thousand years. Dr. Brewer states that the word chess is the modern English representative of the Persian shaṟ (King), and makes the call check-mate to be a translation of the Persian shar mat ‘the King is dead’.
Perhaps the more reliable authority, however, is Antonius Van der Linde, whose book is regarded as the final word on the game. His opinion, after a lifetime spent in tracing the beginning of the game, is that it originated with the Buddhists in India not earlier than the third century A. D.
He traces the word chess to the Hindustani chaturanga (the four angas), the four members of the army – elephants, horses, chariots (a two-wheeled horse-drawn battle car) and foot (soldiers). The name, he thinks, was changed by the Persians into shaltrang (chetrang), by the Arabs, subsequently, into shaltrang, from which the French again changed it into échecs. The English translated it to checks, and so it became chess.
The name "rook" and "pawn" are both of Hindu origin, "rook" being the Hindu rat’h 'an armed chariot', and "pawn" the Hindu peon 'an attendant'.