A verb that inspects, a noun that stops
In everyday English, check is a crowded word. You check a lock, a figure, or a story. You write a check to a bank, or ask for the check after a meal. On a chessboard you put a king in check. At a coatroom you leave a hat and take a numbered stub. The cluster looks accidental until the history is lined up. Almost every living sense grew from a warning that a king was under attack.
The origin of the word check is not native Old English. Speakers of Middle English borrowed it as chek or chekke from Old French eschec, also spelled eschek or eschac. That French noun could mean the game, the board, the cry that the king was threatened, and the threat itself. A related form, eschequier, named the chessboard and a check at chess. English therefore took the term as imported game vocabulary, not as a home-grown verb of looking or testing.
From a Persian king to a French board
The longer trail is firm at its core, even where handbooks disagree about the last Romance hops. Old French reflects Medieval Latin scaccus; some accounts also reconstruct a Vulgar Latin scaccus. That Latin form follows Arabic shāh, used both for a king and for the chess warning that the king was in danger. Arabic had the word from Persian shāh, king — the same title English later borrowed independently as shah.
Persian shāh continues an Iranian line. It goes back through Middle Persian to Old Persian xšāyaθiya, a royal title built on a verb meaning to rule or to have power. That verb is Indo-Iranian, and etymologists connect it further to a Proto-Indo-European root for gaining power or control. English check is thus a distant relative of words for kingship, not of native English words for seeing or proving.
Because the game carried its vocabulary west, sister forms sit all over Europe: French échec, Italian scacco, Dutch schaak, German Schach, Danish skak, Swedish schack, Icelandic skák. English chess is a doublet from the same French stock, taken from the plural that named the game. Checkmate travels a parallel path from a Persian phrase about the king left helpless. The family is chess terminology first. Later English meanings are expansions of that family, not separate roots.
Some dictionaries place Old Spanish between Arabic and Old French. Others go from Arabic into Medieval Latin and then into French. The dispute is about the Romance corridor. It is not about the Persian and Arabic core.
Why a threatened king became a stop
The earliest English use, around 1300, is the chess call and the chess situation: the king is exposed to capture on the next move, so the player’s choices collapse. That constraint is the hinge. If a king in check cannot roam freely, to check someone or something is to stop, arrest, or block it. The verb in that figurative sense is already in late-fourteenth-century English. The strictly chess verb, to put a king in check, is recorded a little later, in the late fifteenth century. Noun and verb then fed each other. The Oxford English Dictionary has long noted that the later senses are hard to order neatly because of that feedback.
From stoppage came hindrance and restraint in the sixteenth century, then the idea of a device or procedure that detects error, forgery, or alteration. A check in that sense is not a glance. It is a control that holds another record, person, or claim in place. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the same logic produced tokens: a hat check, a baggage check, a stub kept so that two copies could be compared. The bank draft — first recorded in English near the end of the eighteenth century, and often spelled cheque — grew from that counterfoil. The stub existed to restrain fraud. The name slid from the control slip to the order itself.
Influence from exchequer is likely. That royal treasury word is also from the chessboard. Norman officials counted revenue on a cloth marked in squares, like a board for the game, and the department took its name from the table. American English kept check for the bank instrument. British usage largely reserved cheque for money and check for the rest. The American restaurant bill appears in the nineteenth century; 1869 is a usual dating. The tick beside an item on a list is later still, mid-nineteenth century as a noun, with the matching verb of marking a list settling across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Phrasal verbs followed the verification sense rather than the chess cry: check off, check up, check in, check out. Checks and balances, from the 1780s, still carries the older idea of a restraint, not a visual inspection. Sports English later used the same stoppage sense for a body check in hockey and similar games. A second, thinner line is the fabric. Check as a pattern of alternating squares, from about 1400, is a shortening of checker or chequer, itself from the chessboard. British spelling often prefers chequer for the pattern. That sense is not a new etymology. It is the board, not the royal warning, that was clipped.
What the history still shows
The modern habit of checking facts looks, on the surface, like a word for seeing. Historically it is a word for stopping a king. Verification entered because a threatened king is forced to answer, and because a second record can hold a first one in place. The Persian title, the Arabic chess call, the French game, and the English bank slip are the same story told at different distances from the board.
A useful remnant is the British spelling cheque. It is a later, specialized spelling of the same word, not a different borrowing. When American English writes a check to a bank, it is still, in name, a device meant to hold a payment in check.