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checkmate

interjectionnounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈt͡ʃɛkmeɪt//

Word called out by the victor when making a move that wins the game.

interjection

  1. 1

    Word called out by the victor when making a move that wins the game.

  2. 2

    Said when one has placed a person in a losing situation with no escape.

Etymology

Etymology tree Old French eschec matbor. Middle English chekmat English checkmate From Middle English chekmat, from Old French eschec mat, from Arabic شَاه مَاتَ (šāh māta), from Classical Persian شاه مات (šāh māt, “the king [is] amazed”).

noun

  1. 1

    The 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. 2

    figurativeAny losing situation with no escape; utter defeat.

verb

  1. 1

    To 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. 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?

Forms

plural
checkmates
past tense
checkmated
past participle
checkmated
present participle
checkmating
third person singular
checkmates
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).