Exchequers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An official treasury or financial institution that manages public funds and expenditures in a government
2. a historical term for a financial department overseeing taxation and revenue collection
3. the place or account where state finances are carefully monitored and disbursed

Etymology: The Exchequer is named after a tablecloth. Medieval English treasurers counted the king's money on a cloth ruled in squares, and the squares made it look like a chessboard. The Anglo-Norman word "escheker" meant "chessboard," and that word came from Medieval Latin "scaccarium," itself from "scaccus," the Latin for "chess" (or the check in the game). The king's finance office took its name from the table's pattern, and the word moved into Middle English as "escheker" before it settled into its modern spelling. Because "exchequers" is simply the plural, it refers to more than one such office or account, most often the treasuries of different states or the separate accounts within one. The word's chess connection is the same as that of "check," which shares the same Latin root and the same board-based origin, so a bank's treasury and a checkmate trace back to one game table.