DICTIONARY or ENCYCLOPEDIA of Chess

Three encyclopedic works were published in the 1800s: J. de la Torre, Diccionario del juego del ajedrez (Barcelona, 1837); Alexandre, Encylopedie des echecs (Paris, 1837); and E. Carlo Usigli (1812-94), Miscellanea sul giuoco degli scacchi (Naples, 1861). The first contains the laws of chess based on Philidor’s book, definitions of chess terms and illustrations of the chess board, names of squares, standard notation, and a Knight’s tour. The second contains only  opening variations. The third is the nearest approach to a comprehensive encyclopedia.A team of Russian experts, including Kubbel and Levenfish, wrote Slovar shakhmatista ( Leningrad, 1929, 6 000 copies), and for the first time there were entries for people and events. This lead, not followed by Sanchez Perez, Diccionario ilustrado de ajedrez (Madrid, 1934), the first in English, and by all subsequent authors.

Since then there have been works in English, German, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Danish, Czech, and Russian. Among the more recent is Szachy od A do Z ( 1986-7) by Litmanowicz and Gizycki, running to about 1 650 pages, and Shakhmaty entsiklopedichesky slovar (1990), a Russian  work edited by a team co-coordinated by Roshal and Averbakh. Other types of book are Oxford Encyclopedia of Chess Games (1981) by David Levy and Kevin O’Connell; which contains the scores of 3 773 games played between 1485 and 1866, and Chess: the Records (1986) by Ken Whyld, which gives the results of all major events.