Databases

The fifth entry is restrição de verificação, and the English word that fills the second half of it has travelled further than anything else on this page. A check constraint restrains a column, and « check » reached that job by a road nobody would guess. The Persian šāh meant king. When chess moved west, the warning that a king stood attacked was said in that word, and it came through Arabic and Old French into English as « check », with « checkmate » out of šāh māt, the king is beaten. A king in check cannot move where he likes, so the word slid off the board and into the idea of holding something back: to check an advance, to keep a rival in check. Only after that did it come to mean looking to see whether a thing is right, and later still it named the slip drawn on a bank, written « cheque » in Britain, and the squared pattern of the board, « chequered ». Portuguese took the plain road instead. Verificar is the Latin verum facere, to make true, so one language tests for truth where the other stops a king.