A position in which a player is obliged to move but cannot do so without disadvantage; the disagreeable obligation to make such a move. Frequently in Zugzwang. Also transferred.
1904
White has struggled bravely and only loses by ‘Zugzwang’.
Lasker's Chess Magazinevol. I.iv. 166
1930
The move..puts Black into a Zugswang [sic] position that speedily loses.
British Chess Magazinevol. I. 196
1935
White has constrained his opponent to move, has placed him, as we say in Germany, in Zugzwang.
Smith & Bone, translation of Tarrasch's Game of Chessi. 5
1942
Black now has only a few pawn moves left after which he is in complete ‘Zugzwang’.
H. Golombek, 50 Great Games Modern Chess 53/2
1963
A doubling of the grab theme, in which a black unit is captured on a number of different squares, leading to zugzwang.
M. Lipton et al., Chess Problems 259
1973
She is, to use a chess term, in complete Zugzwang. She could only make six tricks for a penalty of 200.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Zugzwang typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
Zugzwang is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of Zugzwang, n., 1940–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1940
0.0004
1950
0.0006
1960
0.0008
1970
0.0011
1980
0.0015
1990
0.0017
2000
0.002
2010
0.0022
Zugzwang, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.