My namesake wrote ...
> Actually, it turns out the "...que" spelling is English affectation.
> The original cheques/checks were issued by counter staff from a book
> which had symmetrical curlicues either side of the perforation between
> the counterfoil and check/cheque.
>
> When the document was presented, they checked its authenticity by
> comparing the edge to the counterfoil. Hence they came to be called
> checks, later Frenchified to "cheque".
Hmmm, all sounds very plausible however ...
The English word 'cheque' is from the French 'chèque' which in turn is
derived from the Arabic word 'sakk'
A sakk was a form of (wait for it) cheque :-) used in the ancient Arab
trading world and thought to have been the inspiration behind the Knights
Templar introducing a form of cheque for use by pilgrims (the first recorded
formal use of paper money drafts in the "modern" Western world although
IOU's in one form or another had, of course, been used prior to this)
There is (according to the OED) no connection between 'cheque' and
'exchequer' despite the similarity between the words - 'exchequer' deriving
from the checker board pattern cloth used with counters as an aid to adding
up by the treasury ('exchequer' or 'exchecker' being the Anglo-French word
for a chess board, spelling optional!)
The typically American modification of the spelling of 'cheque' to the
slightly more phonetic 'check' then leads back to erroneous and somewhat
circular explanations of the word origin based around the idea that the word
relates to some method of "checking" the validity of the document - whilst
such checks as described above were indeed introduced to counter fraud,
cheques had been around for centuries beforehand!
Regards
Bru
