Descriptive notation

Descriptive notation is a notation for recording chess games, and at one time was the most popular notation in English- and Spanish-speaking countries (Brace 1977:79–80) (Sunnucks 1970:325). It was used in Europe until it was superseded by algebraic notation, introduced by Philipp Stamma in 1737. Algebraic notation is more concise and requires less effort to avoid ambiguity, but much older literature uses descriptive notation. Descriptive notation exists in many language-based variants, the most prevalent being English descriptive notation and Spanish descriptive notation. Natural language was generally used to describe moves in early chess literature and is the ultimate source of all forms of descriptive notation. Over time, abbreviations became common, and a system of notation gradually evolved. By the time of Howard Staunton's The Chess-Player's Handbook (1847), a common first move for White was recorded as "P. to K's 4th.", which was later reduced to "P-K4". Notably, in the back of the book, Staunton offers brief descriptions of long algebraic notation, noting its adoption by "Alexandre, Jaenisch, the 'Handbuch,' and in Germany generally" (Staunton 1847:500–02), and of "Koch's Notation" (Staunton 1847:502–03), now generally known as ICCF numeric notation.

FIDE stopped recognizing descriptive notation in 1981.

With the exception of the knight, each piece is abbreviated to the first letter of its name: K for king, Q for queen, R for rook, B for bishop, P for pawn. Knight begins with the same letter as king, so it is abbreviated to either Kt (used in older chess literature) or N. "N" is used in this article. In 1944 Chess Review received many letters debating the change from Kt to N (Lawrence 2009:10).

In descriptive notation each square has two names, depending on Black's or White's viewpoint. Each file is given a name corresponding with the piece that occupies the first rank at the start of the game. Thus in English descriptive notation the queen's file is named "Q" and the king's file is named "K". Since there are two each of the remaining pieces on the first rank, it is necessary to distinguish between them. The pieces on the queen's side of the board (left for White, right for Black) are named with respect to the queen i.e. "queen's rook", "queen's knight" and "queen's bishop" and have the shortened names "QR", "QN" and "QB" respectively. Similarly, the pieces on the king's side (right for White, left for Black) are named with respect to the king i.e. "king's rook", "king's knight" and "king's bishop" and have the shortened names "KR", "KN" and "KB" respectively. The rank is given a number, ranging from 1 to 8, with rank 1 being closest to the player. This method of naming the squares means that each square has one name from White's point of view and another from Black's. For instance, the corner square nearest White's left hand ("a1" in algebraic notation) is called "queen's rook 1" (QR1) by White and "queen's rook 8" (QR8) by Black.

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