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say it: CHEK-mayt
checkmate is a noun and verb meaning "complete victory". It carries 3 recorded senses.
complete victory
a chess move constituting an inescapable and indefensible attack on the opponent's king
place an opponent's king under an attack from which it cannot escape and thus ending the game
“Kasparov checkmated his opponent after only a few moves”
chess
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for checkmate come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.