Chess in French

The thirteenth entry is l’enfilade, and the difficulty is that « enfilade » is an English word as well. It reached us from enfiler, to thread, and it kept two of that verb’s pictures. In English it is fire that rakes a line of men from one end to the other, and it is a run of rooms whose doorways line up so that the eye goes straight through. Neither of those is what this entry means. On the board l’enfilade is the move English calls « a skewer »: a piece attacks along a line, the valuable man in front has to step aside, and whatever was standing behind him is taken. The threading is exactly the same, applied to pieces rather than to soldiers or doorways, and English went off and borrowed a word from the kitchen instead. Two things follow. « The enfilade wins the rook » reads, in an English report, as a sentence about guns. And une enfilade de pièces in a château is a row of rooms, even though une pièce is also a chessman.