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A Glossary of Basic Chess Variant Terms. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, May 1, 2020 04:10 PM UTC:

John William Brown created this page 20 years ago, and he wrote on it

Perhaps sometime within the next decade, a few dozen terms will have earned the popularity they need to merit an official lexicon. This is how new terms become a part of a common language. The only problem that I have with this process is that we could use that lexicon now! It is for this reason that I have jumped the gun, so to speak, and assembled the following terms into a modest CV glossary.

It has been longer than that, and it's about time we updated the glossary. The original purpose behind the glossary was a good one. We need a common vocabulary for speaking about Chess variants, and we need a common reference for that vocabulary.

Brown drew from multiple sources to build this glossary. We all have access to this site, which is one of them. I own copies of the books by Pritchard and Dickins. All I'm missing is Brace's book. If there are other resources we can draw upon, please mention them in a comment.

In updating this project, I aim to

  1. Weed out terms that are not commonly used.
  2. Weed out terms that don't need to be in the glossary because we have separate pages on them.
  3. Add terms that should be in the glossary.
  4. Make sure that terms are defined cleary and unambiguously.
  5. Make sure that terms are defined consistently with current usage.
  6. Make sure that terms are defined in a manner that works with multiple Chess variants.

However you think you may help, please do. You may post your thoughts and ideas here as we go about this.