Word of the Moment: Pawn

In the next few editions of our Word of the Moment feature, we will begin a series examining the pieces used in European chess, how they have evolved over the game's long history and how they got their names.

We begin with the lowliest piece on the board, the pawn. The infantry often gets poor billing in war, reflected in the often less than charitable connotations of such words as “grunt,” or even “cannon fodder.”  “Pawn” itself has grown into a somewhat derisive meaning, as in “somebody's pawn” or "merely a pawn ." But where does the word itself come from?


The roots of the word "pawn," as with so many other Anglo-French words in our language, comes from the everyday Latin of people living in the wake of the Roman Empire.  The word “pedonem,” meant someone going by foot in Late Latin and astute readers will notice the connection with the Latin word “pedis” as in “pedestrian.” By the time the Roman Empire was a faded memory of glory the word specifically meant a foot soldier. 

As the latter forms of Latin began to melt into the colloquial Romance languages, “pedonem,” lost a good deal of its sounds, reducing down first to “pehon” and then losing its H to become “peon.”  We would later meet up with the word “peon” again, from Spanish, in which it also describes a lowly figure.  It was borrowed to describe horseless agricultural workers in Mexico and is now used by English speakers to mean lowly and unskilled laborers.

Vowel changes being what they are, “peon” was pronounced /pown/ by the French speakers ruling England around the start of the Hundred Years War.  This Anglo-French word /pown/ became the English word “pawn” around the fourteenth century after the word was applied to the small, carved soldiers of on a chess board. 

Every version of the game, from Japanese Sho-gi to China's Xianqi, has a row of pieces representing the foot soldiers of any army.  The pawn's analogs in other versions of chess almost always shares a similar etymology with soldiers, such as "asker" in Turkish or the "baidaq" in the Arabic version of chess, Shatranj. In German, a pawn is known as a "Bauer," or farmer, perhaps because of the medieval tradition of rounding up peasants, arming them and sending them to the front line. All of these terms, of course, reveal universals that are more military than linguistic.

Pawns became overshadowed by development of powerful bishops, rooks and then the queen in European chess.  Relegated to a fairly unimportant role during the Romantic period of Chess, pawns have a tendency to be seen as expendable.  The brilliant François-André Philidor, the chess phenomenon of the eighteenth century, understood the power of pawns working cooperatively and beat the greatest masters of his day with a slow, inexorable march of pawns down the board.  That this strategy came about during a time the philosophical egalitarianism of Locke, Rouseau and Voltaire is probably coincidental, but oddly appropriate.

There is a bit of folklore surrounding the pawn, at least during the earlier times.  In 1474, the "Game and Playe of the Chesse," , a how-to guide to the game of chess, was published in England. This book tried to give jobs to each of the pawns on the board, associating them with characters from a village such as the “policeman,” “baker,” “drunkard,” etc.  This convention never really caught on, and until recently pawns were named after the pieces they stood in front of at the very beginning of the game: “Queen's Pawn” or “Knight's pawn” for example.

Given the popularity of the game of chess in English speaking places, it is unsurprising that its vernacular has entered into common usage.  Both “checkmate” and “stalemate” have left the gaming table.  So has “pawn,” although the association with a worthless or easily sacrificed gaming piece has lingered.

To describe somebody as a “pawn” generally implies that they are being manipulated by others, and not even as a particularly important piece in their master's strategy.  This attitude is hardly unique to Europeans.  The seventh century poet al-Farazdaq used the Arabic terminology from shatranj when he said: “you are a baidaq (pawn) among bayadiq (pawns)” in a phrase that echos the early twenty-first century phrase: “a pawn in the game of life.”

True, the history of the word pawn does not paint a flattering picture of the rank and file, but given that chess was a game of kings and generals, it might explain a lot about medieval attitudes towards the underclass.  They bequeath to us an impression of the pawn as a mindless, but singularly purposed individual, playing their minor role and taking orders.  Not flattering, to be true, but imagine playing a game of chess without them....

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This has been another mindless, but singularly purposed edition of Schendo's Word of the Moment. Much of the information about the history of chess has been taken from David Shenk's 2007 book The Immortal Game, a wonderfully eclectic look at the social history of chess. Ari Luiro's website provided translations of chess pieces in many languages.