Cheque

How to spell cheque

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cheque

What does cheque mean?

1. nounA printed form on which you write an amount of money for your bank to pay from your account.

Cheque in a sentence

• She wrote a cheque for the full rent and posted it that afternoon.

• The builder asked to be paid by cheque rather than in cash.

Where does cheque come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is really a specialised spelling of 'check', which itself came into English from Old French 'eschec', meaning a check in the game of chess (ultimately from Persian 'shah', meaning 'king', the cry warning that the king is under threat). From that game sense the idea broadened to mean 'a stop' or 'a control', and by the 1700s a written banking order was called a 'check' because it served as a control against forgery and as a record that money had been counted. British writers gradually adopted the French-looking spelling 'cheque' for the banking sense, probably influenced by 'exchequer', the royal treasury, helping keep the financial noun visually separate from the ordinary verb 'to check'. American English never made that split and still writes 'check' for both, which is why 'cheque' looks foreign to many. The -que ending is the spelling trap: it preserves that French flavour even though the word sounds exactly like 'check'.

How the word is built

• cheque (a written banking order; the -que spelling distinguishes it from the verb 'check')

British and American spelling

Cheque is the British spelling. American English spells it check.

Words that sound like cheque

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• czech: Relating to the Czech Republic, its people, or their language.