A king being mate (shah-mat) then means a king is unable to respond, which would correspond to there being no response that a player's king can make to the opponent's final move. So a possible alternative would be to interpret mate as "unable to respond". The words "stupefied" or "stunned" bear close correlation. In modern Persian, the word mate depicts a person who is frozen, open-mouthed, staring, confused and unresponsive. So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate. "Māt" ( مات) is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated". Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Shāh" ( شاه) is the Persian word for the monarch. It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised", in the military sense of "ambushed". It comes from a Persian verb mandan ( ماندن), meaning "to remain", which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō ( μένω, which means "I remain"). Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Arab world, and Arabic māta ( مَاتَ) means "died" or "is dead". Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root. The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" ( شاه مات) which means "the King is helpless". Look up checkmate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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