Exchequer

How to spell exchequer

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce exchequer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exchequer mean?

1. nounA national or royal treasury; the government department responsible for public funds, especially in Britain.
2. nounA person's or organisation's available money or finances, used informally.

Exchequer in a sentence

• The budget surplus was a welcome boost to the exchequer.

• After the holiday the family exchequer was looking rather thin.

• Every new tax measure must be cleared with the exchequer first.

• The unexpected repair bill drained the club exchequer for the month.

Where does exchequer come from?

Language of origin: French

The word goes back to the Old French eschequier, which literally meant a chessboard, and behind that lies the Medieval Latin scaccarium, a counting board marked out in squares. The ultimate ancestor is the Persian word shah, meaning king, which travelled into Europe along with the game of chess. In medieval England the royal treasury reckoned its accounts by moving counters across a large cloth ruled into a chequered grid that resembled a chessboard, so the department itself came to be called the Exchequer. The opening 'ex-' was added later by mistaken association with the Latin prefix meaning out, which is why the modern spelling differs from the related word 'chequer' (and from American 'checker'). That same square-board image survives in the everyday words 'check' and 'cheque', and it is the reason the tricky '-quer' ending sits at the heart of the spelling.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• chequer (from Old French eschequier, a chessboard/counting board); the -quer ending preserves the French spelling