NOTE: Plurality here presumably alludes to the multiple number of playing pieces, as with other games denoted by plural nouns, though the noun pluralized is not itself a playing piece. As a name for the game checkers is an Americanism, apparently first attested in the journal of the Massachusetts magistrate Samuel Sewall (1652-1730). The usual British correspondent is draughts, but Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary recorded checkers in the northern English counties of Northumberland and Durham.