The word cheque may trace back through chess to the Persian word for king
Dictionaries link the banking sense of check to guarding against forgery, a use of check meaning control. That meaning comes from chess, where check reached English through French, Latin and Arabic from the Persian shah, king. Persia also gave banking its cak, a written credit note that became the Arabic sakk.
A cheque is a written instruction to your bank, or a similar institution such as a credit union, to hand over a fixed sum from the writer's account to a named person. The writer, or drawer, fills in the amount, date and payee and signs; the bank being instructed is the drawee. Unlike a bearer note, it must be paid to the payee, though in places like the United States the payee can endorse it over to someone else. Cheques are a kind of bill of exchange, invented so people need not haul around large sums of cash.
Versions are ancient. India's Maurya Empire, between 321 and 185 BC, used the adesha, an order asking a banker to pay a third party, and Romans of the 1st century BC are thought to have used praescriptiones. From the third century AD, Persian banks issued letters of credit, and by the ninth century a merchant could cash a sakk from his home bank in another country, far safer than carrying coins. The traveller Ibn Hawqal recorded one written at Aoudaghost worth 42,000 dinars. Venice developed the bill of exchange in the 13th century for international trade, and in the early 1500s Dutch cashiers holding deposits began paying out on written orders from their customers, an idea that spread to England.
The spelling split is newer than it looks. Check was the original English form; for roughly three centuries writers mixed several spellings freely, and the banker James William Gilbart helped fix cheque, from French, around 1828. Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth now reserve cheque for the payment slip, while Americans write check for everything.
Cheques became the dominant non-cash payment of the 20th century. Automated processing let billions be written every year, a volume that peaked around the early 1990s. Since then debit cards, credit cards and mobile payments have pushed them aside, and several countries have sidelined or abolished them altogether.
Source: Cheque
