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Cheque

A cheque (British English) or check (American English); is a document that orders a bank, building society (or credit union) to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account (often called a current, cheque, chequing, checking, or share draft account) where the money is held. The drawer writes various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay the amount of money stated to the payee.

Although forms of cheques have been in use since ancient times and at least since the 9th century, they became a highly popular non-cash method for making payments during the 20th century and usage of cheques peaked. By the second half of the 20th century, as cheque processing became automated, billions of cheques were issued annually; these volumes peaked in or around the early 1990s. Since then cheque usage has fallen, being replaced by electronic payment systems, such as debit cards and credit cards. In an increasing number of countries cheques have either become a marginal payment system or have been completely phased out.

Nature of a cheque
A cheque is a negotiable instrument instructing a financial institution to pay a specific amount of a specific currency from a specified transactional account held in the drawer's name with that institution. Both the drawer and payee may be natural persons or legal entities. Cheques are order instruments, and are not in general payable simply to the bearer as bearer instruments are, but must be paid to the payee. In some countries, such as the US, the payee may endorse the cheque, allowing them to specify a third party to whom it should be paid.

Cheques are a type of bill of exchange that were developed as a way to make payments without the need to carry large amounts of money. Paper money evolved from promissory notes, another form of negotiable instrument similar to cheques in that they were originally a written order to pay the given amount to whoever had it in their possession (the "bearer").

Spelling and etymology
Check is the original spelling in the English language. The newer spelling, cheque (from the French), is believed to have come into use around 1828, when the switch was made by James William Gilbart in his Practical Treatise on Banking. The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century. However, since the 19th century, in the Commonwealth and Ireland, the spelling cheque (from the French word chèque) has become standard for the financial instrument, while check is used only for other meanings, thus distinguishing the two definitions in writing.

In American English, the usual spelling for both is check.

Etymological dictionaries attribute the financial meaning of check to come from "a check against forgery", with the use of "check" to mean "control" stemming from the check used in chess, a term which came into English through French, Latin, Arabic, and ultimately from the Persian word shah, or "king".

History
The cheque had its origins in the ancient banking system, in which bankers would issue orders at the request of their customers, to pay money to identified payees. Such an order was referred to as a bill of exchange. The use of bills of exchange facilitated trade by eliminating the need for merchants to carry large quantities of currency (for example, gold) to purchase goods and services.

Early years
There is early evidence of using bill of exchange. In India, during the Maurya Empire (from 321 to 185 BC), a commercial instrument called the adesha was in use, which was an order on a banker desiring him to pay the money of the note to a third person.

The ancient Romans are believed to have used an early form of cheque known as praescriptiones in the 1st century BC.

Beginning in the third century AD, banks in Persian territory began to issue letters of credit. These letters were termed čak, meaning "document" or "contract". The čak became the sakk later used by traders in the Abbasid Caliphate and other Arab-ruled lands. Transporting a paper sakk was more secure than transporting money. In the ninth century, a merchant in one country could cash a sakk drawn on his bank in another country. The Persian poet, Ferdowsi, used the term "cheque" several times in his famous book, Shahnameh, when referring to the Sasanid dynasty.

Ibn Hawqal, living in the 10th century, records the use of a cheque written in Aoudaghost which was worth 42,000 dinars.

In the 13th century the bill of exchange was developed in Venice as a legal device to allow international trade without the need to carry large amounts of gold and silver. Their use subsequently spread to other European countries.

In the early 1500s, to protect large accumulations of cash, people in the Dutch Republic began depositing their money with "cashiers". These cashiers held the money for a fee. Competition drove cashiers to offer additional services including paying money to any person bearing a written order from a depositor to do so. They kept the note as proof of payment. This concept went on to spread to England and elsewhere.

Modern era
By the 17th century, bills of exchange were being used for domestic payments in England. Cheques, a type of bill of exchange, then began to evolve. Initially, they were called drawn notes, because they enabled a customer to draw on the funds that he or she had in the account with a bank and required immediate payment. These were handwritten, and one of the earliest known still to be in existence was drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, scriveners and bankers based in the City of London, and dated 16 February 1659.

In 1717, the Bank of England pioneered the first use of a pre-printed form. These forms were printed on "cheque paper" to prevent fraud, and customers had to attend in person and obtain a numbered form from the cashier. Once written, the cheque was brought back to the bank for settlement. The suppression of banknotes in eighteenth-century England further promoted the use of cheques.

Until about 1770, an informal exchange of cheques took place between London banks. Clerks of each bank visited all the other banks to exchange cheques while keeping a tally of balances between them until they settled with each other. Daily cheque clearing began around 1770 when the bank clerks met at the Five Bells, a tavern in Lombard Street in the City of London, to exchange all their cheques in one place and settle the balances in cash. This was the first bankers' clearing house.

Provincial clearinghouses were established in major cities throughout the UK to facilitate the clearing of cheques on banks in the same town. Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Southampton all had their own clearinghouses.

In America, the Bank of New York began issuing cheques after its establishment by Alexander Hamilton in 1784. The oldest surviving example of a complete American chequebook from the 1790s was discovered by a family in New Jersey. The documents are in some ways similar to modern-day cheques, with some data pre-printed on sheets of paper alongside blank spaces for where other information could be hand-written as needed.

It is thought that the Commercial Bank of Scotland was the first bank to personalize its customers' cheques, in 1811, by printing the name of the account holder vertically along the left-hand edge. In 1830 the Bank of England introduced books of 50, 100, and 200 forms and counterparts, bound or stitched. These cheque books became a common format for the distribution of cheques to bank customers.

In the late 19th century, several countries formalized laws regarding cheques. The UK passed the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, and India passed the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881; which both covered cheques.

In 1931, an attempt was made to simplify the international use of cheques by the Geneva Convention on the Unification of the Law Relating to Cheques. Many European and South American states, as well as Japan, joined the convention. However, countries including the US and members of the British Commonwealth did not participate and so it remained very difficult for cheques to be used across country borders.

In 1959 a standard for machine-readable characters (MICR) was agreed upon and patented in the US for use with cheques. This opened the way for the first automated reader/sorting machines for clearing cheques. As automation increased, the following years saw a dramatic change in the way in which cheques were handled and processed. Cheque volumes continued to grow; in the late 20th century, cheques were the most popular non-cash method for making payments, with billions of them processed each year. Most countries saw cheque volumes peak in the late 1980s or early 1990s, after which electronic payment methods became more popular and the use of cheques declined.

In 1969 cheque guarantee cards were introduced in several countries, allowing a retailer to confirm that a cheque would be honored when used at a point of sale. The drawer would sign the cheque in front of the retailer, who would compare the signature to the signature on the card and then write the cheque-guarantee-card number on the back of the cheque. Such cards were generally phased out and replaced by debit cards, starting in the mid-1990s.

From the mid-1990s, many countries enacted laws to allow for cheque truncation, in which a physical cheque is converted into electronic form for transmission to the paying bank or clearing-house. This eliminates the cumbersome physical presentation and saves time and processing costs.

In 2002, the Eurocheque system was phased out and replaced with domestic clearing systems. Old Eurocheques could still be used, but they were now processed by national clearing systems. At that time, several countries took the opportunity to phase out the use of cheques altogether. As of 2010, many countries have either phased out the use of cheques altogether or signaled that they would do so in the future.

Parts of a cheque
[[File:BritishChequeAnnotated.png|frame|Parts of a cheque based on a UK example 1. Drawee

2. Payee

3. Date of issue

4. Amount of currency

5. Drawer

6. Signature of drawer

7. Machine-readable routing and account information]]

The four main items on a cheque are:
 * Drawer: the person or entity whose transaction account is to be drawn. Usually, the drawer's name and account is preprinted on the cheque, and the drawer is usually the signatory.
 * Payee: the person or entity who is to be paid the amount.
 * Drawee: the bank or other financial institution where the cheque can be presented for payment. This is usually preprinted on the cheque.
 * Amount: the currency amount. The amount and currency (e.g., dollars, pounds, etc.) usually must be written in words and in figures. The currency is usually the local currency, but may be a foreign currency.

As cheque usage increased during the 19th and 20th centuries, additional items were added to increase security or to make processing easier for the financial institution. A signature of the drawer was required to authorize the cheque, and this is the main way to authenticate the cheque. Second, it became customary to write the amount in words as well as in numbers to avoid mistakes and make it harder to fraudulently alter the amount after the cheque had been written. It is not a legal requirement to write the amount in words, although some banks will refuse to accept cheques that do not have the amount in both numbers and words.

An issue date was added, and cheques may become invalid a certain amount of time after issue. In the US and Canada, a cheque is typically valid for six months after the date of issue, after which it is a stale-dated cheque, but this depends on where the cheque is drawn. In Australia, a cheque is typically valid for fifteen months of the cheque date. A cheque that has an issue date in the future, a post-dated cheque, may not be able to be presented until that date has passed. In some countries writing a post dated cheque may simply be ignored or is illegal. Conversely, an antedated cheque has an issue date in the past.

A cheque number was added and cheque books were issued so that cheque numbers were sequential. This allowed for some basic fraud detection by banks and made sure one cheque was not presented twice.

In some countries, such as the US, cheques may contain a memo line where the purpose of the cheque can be indicated as a convenience without affecting the official parts of the cheque. In the United Kingdom a memo line is not available and such notes may be written on the reverse side of the cheque.

In the US, at the top (when cheque oriented vertically) of the reverse side of the cheque, there are usually one or more blank lines labelled something like "Endorse here".

Starting in the 1960s, machine-readable routing and account information was added to the bottom of cheques in MICR format, which allowed automated sorting and routing of cheques between banks and led to automated central clearing facilities. The information provided at the bottom of the cheque is country-specific and standards are set by each country's cheque clearing system. This means that the payee no longer has to go to the bank that issued the cheque, they can instead deposit it at their own bank or any other bank and the cheque would be routed back to the originating bank, and funds transferred to their own bank account.

In the US, the bottom $5/8$-inch (16 mm) of the cheque is reserved for MICR characters only. Intrusion into the MICR area can cause problems when the cheque runs through the clearinghouse, requiring someone to print an MICR cheque correction strip and glue it to the cheque. Many new ATMs do not use deposit envelopes and actually scan the cheque at the time it is deposited and will reject cheques due to handwriting incursion which interferes with reading the MICR. This can cause considerable inconvenience as the depositor may have to wait days for the bank to be open and may have difficulty getting to the bank even when they are open; this can delay the availability of the portion of a deposit which their bank makes available immediately as well as the balance of the deposit. Terms of service for many mobile (cell phone camera) deposits also require the MICR section to be readable. Not all of the MICR characters have been printed at the time the cheque is written, as additional characters will be printed later to encode the amount; thus a sloppy signature could obscure characters that will later be printed there. Since MICR characters are no longer necessarily printed in magnetic ink and will be scanned by optical rather than magnetic means, the readers will be unable to distinguish pen ink from pre-printed magnetic ink; these changes allow cheques to be printed on ordinary home and office printers without requiring pre-printed cheque forms, allow ATM deposit capture, allow mobile deposits, and facilitate electronic copies of cheques.

For additional protection, a cheque can be crossed, which restricts the use of the cheque so that the funds must be paid into a bank account. The format and wording varies from country to country, but generally two parallel lines may be placed either vertically across the cheque or in the top left hand corner. In addition the words 'or bearer' must not be used, or if pre-printed on the cheque must be crossed out on the payee line. If the cheque is crossed with the words 'Account Payee' or similar then the cheque can only be paid into the bank account of the person initially named as the payee, thus it cannot be endorsed to a different payee.

Attached documents
Cheques sometimes include additional documents. A page in a chequebook may consist of both the cheque itself and a stub or  – when the cheque is written, only the cheque itself is detached, and the stub is retained in the chequebook as a record of the cheque. Alternatively, cheques may be recorded with carbon paper behind each cheque, in ledger sheets between cheques or at the back of a chequebook, or in a completely separate transaction register that comes with a chequebook.

When a cheque is mailed, a separate letter or "remittance advice" may be attached to inform the recipient of the purpose of the cheque – formally, which account receivable to credit the funds to. This is frequently done formally using a provided slip when paying a bill, or informally via a letter when sending an ad hoc cheque.

Usage
Parties to regular cheques generally include a drawer, the depositor writing a cheque; a drawee, the financial institution where the cheque can be presented for payment; and a payee, the entity to whom the drawer issues the cheque. The drawer drafts or draws a cheque, which is also called cutting a cheque, especially in the US. There may also be a beneficiary—for example, in depositing a cheque with a custodian of a brokerage account, the payee will be the custodian, but the cheque may be marked "F/B/O" ("for the benefit of") the beneficiary.

Ultimately, there is also at least one endorsee which would typically be the financial institution servicing the payee's account, or in some circumstances may be a third party to whom the payee owes or wishes to give money.

A payee that accepts a cheque will typically deposit it in an account at the payee's bank, and have the bank process the cheque. In some cases, the payee will take the cheque to a branch of the drawee bank, and cash the cheque there. If a cheque is refused at the drawee bank (or the drawee bank returns the cheque to the bank that it was deposited at) because there are insufficient funds for the cheque to clear, it is said that the cheque has been dishonoured. Once a cheque is approved and all appropriate accounts involved have been credited, the cheque is stamped with some kind of cancellation mark, such as a "paid" stamp. The cheque is now a cancelled cheque. Cancelled cheques are placed in the account holder's file. The account holder can request a copy of a cancelled cheque as proof of a payment. This is known as the cheque clearing cycle.

Cheques can be lost or go astray within the cycle, or be delayed if further verification is needed in the case of suspected fraud. A cheque may thus bounce some time after it has been deposited.

Following concerns about the amount of time it took the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company to clear cheques, the United Kingdom Office of Fair Trading set up a working group in 2006 to look at the cheque clearing cycle. Their report said that clearing times could be improved, but that the costs associated with speeding up the cheque clearing cycle could not be justified considering the use of cheques was declining. However, they concluded the biggest problem was the unlimited time a bank could take to dishonour a cheque. To address this, changes were implemented so that the maximum time after a cheque was deposited that it could be dishonoured was six days, what was known as the "certainty of fate" principle.

An advantage to the drawer of using cheques instead of debit card transactions is that they know the drawer's bank will not release the money until several days later. Paying with a cheque without adequate funds backing it and later making a deposit to the account on which the cheque is drawn in order to cover the cheque amount is called "kiting" or "floating" and is generally illegal in the US, but applicable laws are rarely enforced unless the drawer uses multiple chequing accounts with multiple institutions to increase the delay or to steal funds.

Declining use
Cheque usage has been declining since the 1990s, both for point of sale transactions (for which credit cards, debit cards or mobile payment apps are increasingly preferred) and for third party payments (for example, bill payments), where the decline has been accelerated by the emergence of telephone banking, online banking, and mobile banking. Being paper-based, cheques are costly for banks to process in comparison to electronic payments, so banks in many countries now discourage the use of cheques, either by charging for cheques or by making the alternatives more attractive to customers. In particular the handling of money transfer requires more effort and is time-consuming. The cheque has to be handed over in person or sent through mail. The rise of automated teller machines (ATMs) means that small amounts of cash are often easily accessible, so that it is sometimes unnecessary to write a cheque for such amounts instead. A number of countries have announced or have already completed the end of cheques as a means of payment.

Decline in Asia
In many Asian countries cheques were never widely used and generally only used by the wealthy, with cash being used for the majority of payments except for India where cheque usage was prevalent. Where cheques were used they have been declining rapidly, by 2009 there was negligible consumer cheque usage in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. This declining trend was accelerated by these developed markets advanced financial services infrastructure. Many of the developing countries in Asia have seen an increasing use of electronic payment systems, 'leap-frogging' the less efficient chequing system altogether.

Decline in Europe
In most European countries, cheques are now rarely used or have been completely phased out, even for third party payments except for the United Kingdom, France and Ireland. In most western European countries, it was standard practice for businesses to publish their bank details on invoices, to facilitate the receipt of payments by giro. Even before the introduction of online banking, it has been possible in some countries to make payments to third parties using ATMs, which may accurately and rapidly capture invoice amounts, due dates, and payee bank details via a bar code reader to reduce keying. In using a cheque, the onus is on the payee to initiate the payment, whereas with a giro transfer, the onus is on the payer to effect the payment.

In the United Kingdom, France and Ireland cheques continued to be used as cheque payments were free for the consumer. However these countries have also seen significant declines since 2000. Since 2001, businesses in the United Kingdom made more electronic payments than cheque payments. The UK Payments Council announced in 2011 that cheques would continue as long as customers needed them reversing a previous target to phase out cheques by 2018.

France, remains well ahead of its European counterparts in the use of cheque payments, as seen in 2020 where it is estimated that more than 1 billion cheque payments were made, compared to Italy, the country with the next highest number of payments, with under 100 million.

Decline in North America
The United States relied heavily on cheques, due to the convenience it affords payers, and due to the absence of a high volume system for low value electronic payments. In the US, an estimated 18.3 billion cheques were paid in 2012, with a value of $25.9 trillion. However even in the United States cheque usage has seen significant decline.

Canada's usage of cheques is less than that of the US and is declining rapidly at the urging of the Canadian Banking Association. The Government of Canada claims it is 6.5 times more expensive to mail a cheque than to make a direct deposit. The Canadian Payments Association reported that in 2012, cheque use in Canada accounted for only 40% of total financial transactions.

Decline in Oceania
Both Australia and New Zealand were heavy users of cheques during the later part of the 20th century. However, following global trends both countries have seen significant decline in the use of cheques.

In Australia, following global trends, the use of cheques continues to decline. In 1994 the value of daily cheque transactions was A$25 billion; by 2004 this had dropped to only A$5 billion, almost all of this for B2B transactions. Personal cheque use is practically non-existent thanks to the longstanding use of the EFTPOS system, BPAY, electronic transfers, and debit cards. The Australian payment systems strategic plan has said it will remove cheques by 2030.

In New Zealand, payments by cheque have declined since the mid-1990s in favour of electronic payment methods and were phased out completely in 2020. In 1993, cheques accounted for over half of transactions through the national banking system, with an annual average of 130 cheques per capita. By 2006 cheques lagged well behind EFTPOS (debit card) transaction and electronic credits, making up only nine per cent of transactions, an annual average of 41 cheque transaction per capita. Most retail stores no longer accept cheques; those that do often require government-issued identification or a store-issued "cheque identification card" before they can be accepted as payment.

Alternatives to cheques
Payment systems other than cheques include:

 * 1) Cash
 * 2) Debit card payments
 * 3) Credit card payments
 * 4) Direct debit (initiated by payee)
 * 5) Direct credit (initiated by payer), ACH in US, giro in Europe, Direct Entry in Australia
 * 6) Wire transfer (local and international) via banks and credit unions or else via major private vendors such as Western Union and MoneyGram
 * 7) Electronic bill payments using Internet banking
 * 8) Online payment services, e.g. WeChat Pay, Alipay, PayPal, Venmo, Unified Payments Interface, PhonePe, and Paytm
 * 9) Money orders or postal orders

Variations on regular cheques
In addition to regular cheques, a number of variations were developed to address specific needs or address issues when using a regular cheque.

Cashier's cheques and bank drafts
Cashier's cheques and banker's drafts, also known as bank cheques, banker's cheques or treasurer's cheques, are cheques issued against the funds of a financial institution rather than an individual account holder. Typically, the term cashier's check is used in the US and banker's draft is used in the UK and most of the Commonwealth. The mechanism differs slightly from country to country but in general the bank issuing the cheque or draft will allocate the funds at the point the cheque is drawn. This provides a guarantee, save for a failure of the bank, that it will be honoured. Cashier's cheques are perceived to be as good as cash but they are still a cheque, a misconception sometimes exploited by scam artists. A lost or stolen cheque can still be stopped like any other cheque, so payment is not completely guaranteed.

Certified cheque
When a certified cheque is drawn, the bank operating the account verifies there are currently sufficient funds in the drawer's account to honour the cheque. Those funds are then set aside in the bank's internal account until the cheque is cashed or returned by the payee. Thus, a certified cheque cannot "bounce", and its liquidity is similar to cash, absent failure of the bank. The bank indicates this fact by making a notation on the face of the cheque (technically called an acceptance).

Payroll cheque
A cheque used to pay wages may be referred to as a payroll cheque. Even when the use of cheques for paying wages and salaries became rare, the vocabulary "pay cheque" still remained commonly used to describe the payment of wages and salaries. Payroll cheques issued by the military to soldiers, or by some other government entities to their employees, beneficiants, and creditors, are referred to as warrants.

Warrants
Warrants look like cheques and clear through the banking system like cheques, but are not drawn against cleared funds in a deposit account. A cheque differs from a warrant in that the warrant is not necessarily payable on demand and may not be negotiable. They are often issued by government entities such as the military to pay wages or suppliers. In this case they are an instruction to the entity's treasurer department to pay the warrant holder on demand or after a specified maturity date.

Traveller's cheque
A traveller's cheque is designed to allow the person signing it to make an unconditional payment to someone else as a result of paying the issuer for that privilege. Traveller's cheques can usually be replaced if lost or stolen, and people frequently used them on holiday instead of cash as many businesses used to accept traveller's cheques as currency. The use of credit or debit cards has begun to replace the traveller's cheque as the standard for vacation money due to their convenience and additional security for the retailer. As a result, many businesses no longer accept traveller's cheques.

Money or postal order
A cheque sold by a post office, bank, or merchant such as a grocery store for payment in favour of a third party is referred to as a money order or postal order. These are paid for in advance when the order is drawn and are guaranteed by the institution that issues them and can only be paid to the named third party. This was a common way to send low value payments to third parties, avoiding the risks associated with sending cash by post, prior to the advent of electronic payment methods.

Oversized cheques

Oversized cheques, also commonly referred to as novelty cheques, are often used in public events such as donating money to charity, announcing government grants, or giving out prizes such as those from lotteries or Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. The cheques are commonly 18 x in size; however, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest ever is 12 x. Until recently, regardless of the size, such cheques could still be redeemed for their cash value as long as they would have the same parts as a normal cheque, although usually the oversized cheque is kept as a souvenir and a normal cheque is provided. Any bank could levy additional charges for clearing an oversized cheque. Most banks need to have the machine-readable information on the bottom of cheques read electronically, so only very limited dimensions can be allowed due to standardised equipment.

Payment vouchers
In the US some public assistance programmes such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children make vouchers available to their beneficiaries, which are good up to a certain monetary amount for purchase of grocery items deemed eligible under the particular programme. The voucher can be deposited like any other cheque by a participating supermarket or other approved business.

Australia
The Australian Cheques Act 1986 is the body of law governing the issuance of cheques and payment orders in Australia. Procedural and practical issues governing the clearance of cheques and payment orders are handled by Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA).

In 1999, banks adopted a system to allow faster clearance of cheques by electronically transmitting information about cheques; this brought clearance times down from five to three days. Previously, cheques were required to be physically transported to the paying bank before processing began, and dishonoured cheques were physically returned.

In June 2023 the Australian government announced it was moving to phase out the use of cheques by 2030.

Canada
In Canada, cheques standards and processing are overseen by Payments Canada. Canadian cheques can legally be written in English, French or Inuktitut. For a period Canada also had a tele-cheque, which was a paper payment item that resembles a cheque except that it is neither created nor signed by the payer—instead it is created (and may be signed) by a third party on behalf of the payer. Under CPA Rules these were prohibited in the clearing system effective 1 January 2004.

Canada's usage of cheques is less than that of the US and has been declining rapidly at the urging of the Canadian Banking Association since 2000. The Government of Canada claims it is 6.5 times more expensive to mail a cheque than to make a direct deposit. The Canadian Payments Association reported that in 2012, cheque use in Canada accounted for only 40% of total financial transactions. The Interac system, which allows instant fund transfers via chip or magnetic strip and PIN, is widely used by merchants to the point that few brick and mortar merchants accept cheques.

The Canadian government began phasing out all government cheques from April 2016.

India
Cheques were first used in India by the Bank of Hindustan, the first joint stock bank established in 1770. In 1881, the Negotiable Instruments Act (NI Act) was enacted in India, formalising the usage and characteristics of instruments like the cheque, the bill of exchange, and promissory note. The NI Act provided a legal framework for non-cash paper payment instruments in India. In 1938, the Calcutta Clearing Banks' Association, which was the largest bankers' association at that time, adopted clearing house.

Beginning in 2010, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) along with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) piloted the cheque truncation system (CTS). Under CTS, cheques are no longer physically transported to different clearing houses. They are processed at the bank where they are presented, where an image of the cheque using Magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) is captured and digitally transmitted.

In 2009 cheques were still widely used as a means of payment in trade, and also by individuals to pay other individuals or utility bills. One of the reasons was that banks usually provided cheques for free to their individual account holders. However, cheques are now rarely accepted at point of sale in retail stores where cash and cards are payment methods of choice. Electronic payment transfer continued to gain popularity in India and like other countries this caused a subsequent reduction in volumes of cheques issued each year. In 2009 the Reserve Bank of India reported there was a five percent decline in cheque usage compared to the previous year. In 2019, the Reserve Bank of India reported that while cheque usage continued to decline, the decrease was slow. The bank attributed the slow pace of the decline due to the fact that cheque volume had briefly increased after demonetisation in 2016 before continuing to fall, as well as the efficiency of India's cheque clearing system.

Israel
Cheques were widely used in the retail market, between persons, and for other payments. The law rules that payments in cash cannot exceed 6,000 NIS, so cheque payment is a legal term when that maximum is reached. It was possible to pay at the cash desk at the supermarket or shop by cheque or issue a check for annual school payments for a child. Utility bills and property tax can be paid by cheque at the post office. Moreover, usually tenant issues twelve post-dated cheques to the landlord after signing the rental agreement: one cheque per month of the rental term; additional cheques signed by a tenant with an open date and amount for utility providers to ensure that the tenant will leave no debts.

Ten bounced cheques during a year would result in the restriction of cheques for the account, and the bank will bounce new cheques for a year. If the account owner continues to draw cheques during the restriction period, that person's accounts in Israeli banks will be denied from issuing cheques.

Japan
In Japan, cheques are called kogitte (小切手), and are governed by kogitte law.

Bounced cheques are called Fuwatari Kogitte (不渡り小切手). If an account owner bounces two cheques in six months, the bank will suspend the account for two years. If the account belongs to a public company, their stock will also be suspended from trading on the stock exchange, which can lead to bankruptcy.

New Zealand
Instrument-specific legislation includes the Cheques Act 1960, part of the Bills of Exchange Act 1908, which codifies aspects related to the cheque payment instrument, notably the procedures for the endorsement, presentment and payment of cheques. A 1995 amendment provided for the electronic presentment of cheques and removed the previous requirement to deliver cheques physically to the paying bank, opening the way for cheque truncation and imaging.

In New Zealand, cheques once banked were processed electronically together with other retail payment instruments. Homeguard v Kiwi Packaging is often cited case law regarding the banking of cheques tendered as full settlement of disputed accounts.

In New Zealand, payments by cheque have declined since the mid-1990s in favour of electronic payment methods. In 1993, cheques accounted for over half of transactions through the national banking system, with an annual average of 130 cheques per capita. By 2006 cheques lagged well behind EFTPOS (debit card) transaction and electronic credits, making up only nine per cent of transactions, an annual average of 41 cheque transaction per capita.

In 2020 New Zealand Banks began phasing out of cheques, and they are no longer accepted as payment. All have moved to other types of payment systems. Kiwibank stopped accepting cheques as payment on 28 February 2020, followed by ANZ on 31 May 2021. Westpac and BNZ stopped accepting cheques on 25 June and 30 June 2021 respectively; ASB was the last major bank to phase out cheques on 27 August 2021.

Poland
Poland withdrew cheques from use in 2006, mainly because of lack of popularity due to the widespread adoption of credit and debit cards. Electronic payments across the European Union became fast and inexpensive—usually free for consumers.

Turkey
In Turkey, cheques were usually used for commercial transactions only, and using post-dated cheques is legally permissible.

United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, all cheques must conform to an industry standard detailing layout and font ("Cheque and Credit Clearing Company (C&CCC) Standard 3"), be printed on a specific weight of paper (CBS1), and contain explicitly defined security features.

Since 1995, all cheque printers must be members of the Cheque Printer Accreditation Scheme (CPAS). The scheme is managed by the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company and requires that all cheques for use in the British clearing process are produced by accredited printers who have adopted stringent security standards.

The rules concerning crossed cheques are set out in Section 1 of the Cheques Act 1992 and prevent cheques being cashed by or paid into the accounts of third parties. On a crossed cheque the words "account payee only" (or similar) are printed between two parallel vertical lines in the centre of the cheque. This makes the cheque non-transferable and is to avoid cheques being endorsed and paid into an account other than that of the named payee. Crossing cheques basically ensures that the money is paid into an account of the intended beneficiary of the cheque.

Following concerns about the amount of time it took banks to clear cheques, the United Kingdom Office of Fair Trading set up a working group in 2006 to look at the cheque clearing cycle. They produced a report recommending maximum times for the cheque clearing which were introduced in UK from November 2007. In the report the date the credit appeared on the recipient's account (usually the day of deposit) was designated "T". At "T + 2" (two business days afterwards) the value would count for calculation of credit interest or overdraft interest on the recipient's account. At "T + 4" clients would be able to withdraw funds on current accounts or at "T + 6" on savings accounts (though this will often happen earlier, at the bank's discretion). "T + 6" is the last day that a cheque can bounce without the recipient's permission—this is known as "certainty of fate". Before the introduction of this standard (also known as 2-4-6 for current accounts and 2-6-6 for savings accounts), the only way to know the "fate" of a cheque has been "Special Presentation", which would normally involve a fee, where the drawee bank contacts the payee bank to see if the payee has that money at that time. "Special Presentation" had been stated at the time of deposit.

Cheque volumes peaked in 1990 when four billion cheque payments were made. Of these, 2.5 billion were cleared through the inter-bank clearing managed by the C&CCC, the remaining 1.5 billion being in-house cheques which were either paid into the branch on which they were drawn or processed intra-bank without going through the clearings. As volumes started to fall, the challenges faced by the clearing banks were then of a different nature: how to benefit from technology improvements in a declining business environment.

Although the UK did not adopt the euro as its national currency when other European countries did in 1999, many banks began offering euro denominated accounts with chequebooks, principally to business customers. The cheques can be used to pay for certain goods and services in the UK. The same year, the C&CCC set up the euro cheque clearing system to process euro denominated cheques separately from sterling cheques in Great Britain.

The UK Payments Council from 30 June 2011 withdrew the existing Cheque Guarantee Card Scheme in the UK. This service allowed cheques to be guaranteed at point of sales up to a certain value, normally £50 or £100, when signed in front of the retailer with the additional cheque guarantee card. This was after a long period of decline in their use in favour of debit cards.

In December 2009 the Payments Council announced its intention to phase out the use of cheques completely in the UK by October 2018, so long as adequate alternatives were developed. They intended to perform annual checks on the progress of other payments systems and a final review of the decision would have been held in 2016. However, the decision was reversed in 2011 after vocal public, political, and industrial opposition, and cheques have remained in use.

Since 2001, businesses in the United Kingdom have made more electronic payments than cheque payments. Automated payments rose from 753 million in 1995 to 1.1 billion in 2001 and cheques declined in that same period of time from 1.14 to 1.1 billion payments. Most British utility companies charge lower prices to customers who pay by direct debit than for other payment methods.

The vast majority of British retailers no longer accept cheques as a means of payment. Shell announced in September 2005 that it would no longer accept cheques at their UK petrol stations, a change replicated by other major fuel retailers. Within a year, Asda, Boots, Currys and WH Smith had all phased out the acceptance of cheques.

In 2016, 432 million inter-bank cheques and credit-items worth £472 billion were processed in the United Kingdom. In 2017, 405 million cheques worth £356 billion were used for payments and acquiring cash, an average of 1.2 million cheques per day, with more than 10 million being cleared in Northern Ireland alone. The Cheque and Credit Clearing Company noted that cheques continue to be highly valued for paying tradesmen and utility bills, and play a vital role in business, clubs and societies sectors, with nine in 10 business saying that they received or made payment by cheque on a monthly basis. In 2022, 150 million cheques were used to make payments in the UK, compared to 1.6 billion payments in 2006. UK Finance estimates that only 0.2% of payments (70 million transactions) will be made by cheque in 2031.

In June 2014, following a successful trial in the UK by Barclays, the UK government gave the go-ahead for a cheque truncation system, allowing people to pay in a cheque by taking a photo of it, rather than physically depositing the paper cheque at a bank. Between 2017 and 2019, the Barclays scheme was rolled out nationwide as the Image Clearing System which has sped up the processing of cheques, reducing clearing times, and allowing customers to deposit them at ATMs and through mobile and online banking applications. Mobile banking has modernised the use of cheques; in the first 6 months of 2021, 3.8 million cheques were deposited by Lloyds Bank customers. Nevertheless, in 2020-21, the use of cheques declined by 19% year on year.

Cheques are still held to be a secure and reliable means of payment: cheque fraud in the UK in 2020 totalled just £12.3 million across 185 million transactions. In the same period, online authorised payment scams totalled £479 million across 4.1 billion online payments. As such, cheques have seen a resurgence in popularity in commercial transactions from businesses to avoid the possibility of phishing fraud.

United States
In the United States, cheques are referred to as checks and are governed by Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, under the rubric of negotiable instruments.
 * An order check—the most common form in the US—is payable only to the named payee or endorsee, as it usually contains the language "Pay to the order of (name)".
 * A bearer check is payable to anyone who is in possession of the document: this would be the case if the cheque does not name a payee, or is payable to "bearer" or to "cash" or "to the order of cash", or if the cheque is payable to someone who is not a person or legal entity, for example if the payee line is marked "Happy Birthday".
 * A counter check is one that a bank issues to an account holder in person. This is typically done for customers who have opened a new account or have run out of personalized cheques. It may lack the usual security features.

In the US, the terminology for a cheque historically varied with the type of financial institution on which it is drawn. In the case of a savings and loan association it was a negotiable order of withdrawal (compare Negotiable Order of Withdrawal account); if a credit union it was a share draft. "Checks" were associated with chartered commercial banks. However, common usage has increasingly conformed to more recent versions of Article 3, where check means any or all of these negotiable instruments. Certain types of cheques drawn on government agencies, especially payroll cheques, may be called warrants.

At the bottom of each cheque there is the routing/account number in MICR format. The ABA routing transit number is a nine-digit number in which the first four digits identifies the US Federal Reserve Bank's cheque-processing centre. This is followed by digits 5 through 8, identifying the specific bank served by that cheque-processing centre. Digit 9 is a verification check digit, computed using a complex algorithm of the previous eight digits.
 * Typically the routing number is followed by a group of eight or nine MICR digits that indicates the particular account number at that bank. The account number is assigned independently by the various banks.
 * Typically the account number is followed by a group of three or four MICR digits that indicates a particular cheque number from that account.
 * Directional routing number—also known as the transit number, consists of a denominator mirroring the first four digits of the routing number, and a hyphenated numerator, also known as the ABA number, in which the first part is a city code (1–49), if the account is in one of 49 specific cities, or a state code (50–99) if it is not in one of those specific cities; the second part of the hyphenated numerator mirrors the 5th through 8th digits of the routing number with leading zeros removed.

A draft in the US Uniform Commercial Code is any bill of exchange, whether payable on demand or at a later date. If payable on demand it is a "demand draft", or if drawn on a financial institution, a cheque.

The electronic cheque or substitute cheque was formally adopted in the US in 2004 with the passing of the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act" (or Check 21 Act). This allowed the creation of electronic cheques and translation (truncation) of paper cheques into electronic replacements, reducing cost and processing time.

The specification for US cheques is given by ANSI committee X9 Technical Report 2.

In 2002 the US still relied heavily on cheques due to the convenience afforded to payers, and due to the absence of a high volume system for low-value electronic payments. In practice, transfers of less than about five dollars are extremely expensive, and transactions of less than 50c impossible (transaction fees swallow the payment or exceed it). The only methods generally available for individuals and small businesses to make payments electronically are electronic funds transfers (EFT) or accepting credit cards. EFT payments require a commercial chequing account (which often has higher fees and minimum balances than individual accounts) and a subscription to EFT service costing anywhere from $10 to $25 a month, plus 10¢ per transaction (making transactions of 10¢ or less impossible, and transactions under $1 very expensive.) Credit card payments cost the recipient (or the payer) 33¢ plus 3% of the transaction, making transactions of 33¢ or less impossible, and transactions of $1 or less have at least a 30% service charge. Generally, payments by cheque (as long as the payer has funds in their account) and the recipient deposits it to their bank account, regardless of amount, have a service charge to both parties of zero.

Since 2002, the decline in cheque usage seen around the world has also started in the US. The cheque, although not as common as it used to be, is still a long way from disappearing completely in the US.

In the US, an estimated 18.3 billion cheques were paid in 2012, with a value of $25.9 trillion.

About 70 billion cheques were written annually in the US by 2001, though around 17 million adult Americans have no bank accounts. Certain companies whom a person pays with a cheque will turn it into an Automated Clearing House (ACH) or electronic transaction. Banks try to save time processing cheques by sending them electronically between banks. Cheque clearing is usually done through an electronic cheque broker, such as The Clearing House, Viewpointe LLC or the Federal Reserve Banks. Copies of the cheques are stored at a bank or the broker, for periods up to 99 years, and this is why some cheque archives have grown to 20 petabytes. The access to these archives is now worldwide, as most bank programming is now done offshore. Many utilities and most credit cards will also allow customers to pay by providing bank information and having the payee draw payment from the customer's account (direct debit). Many people in the US pay their bills or transfer money via paper money orders, as these have security advantages over mailing cash and require no bank-account access.

Cheque fraud
Cheques have been a tempting target for criminals to steal money or goods from the drawer, payee or the banks. A number of measures have been introduced to combat fraud over the years. These range from things like writing a cheque so it is difficult to alter after it is drawn, to mechanisms like crossing a cheque so that it can only be paid into another bank's account providing some traceability. However, the inherent security weaknesses of cheques as a payment method, such as having only the signature as the main authentication method and not knowing if funds will be received until the clearing cycle is complete, have made them vulnerable to a number of different types of fraud.

Embezzlement
Taking advantage of the float period (cheque kiting) to delay the notice of non-existent funds. This often involves trying to convince a merchant or other recipient, hoping the recipient will not suspect that the cheque will not clear, giving time for the fraudster to disappear.

Forgery
Sometimes, forgery is the method of choice in defrauding a bank. One form of forgery involves the use of a victim's legitimate cheques, that have either been stolen and then cashed, or altering a cheque that has been legitimately written to the perpetrator, by adding words or digits to inflate the amount.

Identity theft
Since cheques include significant personal information (name, account number, signature and in some countries driver's license number, the address or phone number of the account holder), they can be used for identity theft. The practice was discontinued as identity theft became widespread.

Dishonoured cheques
A dishonoured cheque is literally one where the payment has not been honoured. i.e. The payment has been refused by the payer's bank, for many of various reasons. Colloquially, it is referred to as bounced. Such a cheque cannot be redeemed for its value and is worthless; they are also known as an RDI (returned deposit item), or NSF (non-sufficient funds) cheque. Cheques are usually dishonoured because the drawer's account has been frozen or limited, or because there are insufficient funds in the drawer's account when the cheque was redeemed. A cheque drawn on an account with insufficient funds is said to have bounced and may be called a rubber cheque. Banks will typically charge customers for issuing a dishonoured cheque, and in some jurisdictions such an act is a criminal action. A drawer may also issue a stop on a cheque, instructing the financial institution not to honour a particular cheque.

In England and Wales, they are typically returned marked "Refer to Drawer"—an instruction to contact the person issuing the cheque for an explanation as to why the cheque was not honoured. This wording was brought in after a bank was successfully sued for libel after returning a cheque with the phrase "Insufficient Funds" after making an error—the court ruled that as there were sufficient funds the statement was demonstrably false and damaging to the reputation of the person issuing the cheque. Despite the use of this revised phrase, successful libel lawsuits brought against banks by individuals remained for similar errors.

In Scotland, a cheque acts as an assignment of the amount of money to the payee. As such, if a cheque is dishonoured in Scotland, what funds are present in the bank account are "attached" and frozen, until either sufficient funds are credited to the account to pay the cheque, the drawer recovers the cheque and hands it into the bank, or the drawer obtains a letter from the payee stating that they have no further interest in the cheque.

A cheque may also be dishonoured because it is stale or not cashed within a "void after date". Many cheques have an explicit notice printed on the cheque that it is void after some period of days. In the US, banks are not required by the Uniform Commercial Code to honour a , which is a cheque presented six months after it is dated.

Consumer reporting
In the United States some consumer reporting agencies such as ChexSystems, Early Warning Services, and TeleCheck have been providing cheque verification services that track how people manage their chequing accounts. Banks use the agencies to screen chequing account applicants, and those with low debit scores are denied because banks cannot afford overdrawn accounts.

In the United Kingdom, in common with other items such as Direct Debits or standing orders, dishonoured cheques can be reported on a customer's credit file, although not individually and this does not happen universally amongst banks. Dishonoured payments from current accounts can be marked in the same manner as missed payments on the customer's credit report.

Lock box
Typically when customers pay bills with cheques (like gas or water bills), the mail will go to a "lock box" at the post office. There a bank will pick up all the mail, sort it, open it, take the cheques and remittance advice out, process it all through electronic machinery, and post the funds to the proper accounts. In modern systems, taking advantage of the Check 21 Act, as in the United States many cheques are transformed into electronic objects and the paper is destroyed.

title: Cheque


text:
Category:Bridges in Cambridgeshire

This category lists articles relating to bridges in the English county of Cambridgeshire, including bridges across the county boundary.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Category:Bridges in Cambridgeshire


text:
Category:Villages in Aberdeenshire

Villages in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, one of 32 unitary council areas of Scotland.

title: Category:Villages in Aberdeenshire


text:
Talk:Mutants & Masterminds

untitled
This article needs a clear, non-add description of the system and it's differences from other Systems.--Circeus 23:25, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"Beyond limiting bonuses, Power Level does nothing to restrict a character's power; a power level 10 character can have a maximum Strength of 40, whereas normal d20 characters would be lucky to have a single 20-rated score at 10th level."

Someone hasn't been eating their Munch-O's. Such a d20 character is monster feed.
 * They're also somewhat wrong -- a PL 10 character in Mutants & Masterminds 2E can only have a Strength of 30 (barring certain Trade-Offs). And I've never had a 10th level D&D char with more than one score above 20. Dr Archeville 11:05, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Having just perused the new 3rd edition ruleset, I can clearly inform you that it is really very much like the old Mayfair MEGS system now. It's strange, but it's like once they knew they had the DC license, they just cut-n-pasted MEGS rules. Weird. 192.44.136.113 (talk) 17:02, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

title: Talk:Mutants & Masterminds


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Last Wolf in Ireland

The Last Wolf in Ireland
The Last Wolf in Ireland was proposed for deletion. This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was delete.

This is an article from someone who seems to be submitting a lot of stuff from text-books (I suspect he's OCR-ing them). Almost certainly a copyvio (without an online source). Not encyclopedic anyway. Every other article created by this IP is also on VfD. [[User:David_Johnson|David Johnson [ T|C ] ]] 23:26, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete, unless someone makes sense from this mess. Mikkalai 02:39, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Totally worthless nonsence. Can this be Speedied? hfool 03:57, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete: This one is worse and could be speedied. The others are just textbook dumps.  This is a set of lyrics, written out as sung, which is absurd.  I.e. properly on Wikisource if not copyrighted, and the other contributions suggest that it is copyrighted.  In other words, with the others, a non-copyvio version could be encyclopedic.  With this one, a non-copyvio version is Wikisource, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the article meeting with a mysterious accident in the night.  Geogre 05:39, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion or on the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Myshall Danish Path

The Myshall Danish Path
The Myshall Danish Path was proposed for deletion. This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was delete.

This is an article from someone who seems to be submitting a lot of stuff from text-books (I suspect he's OCR-ing them). Almost certainly a copyvio (without an online source). Not encyclopedic anyway. Every other article created by this IP is also on VfD. [[User:David_Johnson|David Johnson [ T|C ] ]] 23:26, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete, unless makes sense from this mess, probable by pot smoker. Mikkalai 02:41, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete: Again, another weirder one. A song mixed in with clips from history book.  It's not even as if it's a total text dump, but as if the contributor is quoting little pieces of paragraphs here and there.  Speedy-able, probably, as Dada.  Geogre 05:42, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion or on the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.


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Talk:Hotel (album)

Album Leak
I removed the info on the album leak, cuz every other album gets an "advanced preview" these days. And the tone of the edit was somewhat inconsistent. Moby's record company may be unhappy with the leak, but Moby has always encouraged the internet as a means of obtaining music, regardless of the legality. --Madchester 16:23, 2005 Feb 19 (UTC)
 * I did the edit, because the 'its leaked' message is there on other album articles. Plus, saying 'so many albums are leaked on the web' is like saying 'so many people live in Germany'. Its still a fact about the album, this isnt really an argument to me... I hoped someone knew the exact date of the leak, and would edit my addition to blend better in the rest of the text. --J. 11:44, 2005 Feb 20
 * GS - L.A.M.B got leaked. Doves - Some Cities got leaked 2 weeks in advance and I had a chance to hear it before it got to this side of the Atlanic.  Coldplay - AROBTTH got leaked too.  Radiohead's HTTF got leaked 3 months in advance and Thom Yorke got kinda peeved.  But ultimately, in the long run history of an album, it's really lttle more than a footnote in its development.  If you're concerned about this, you could simply start a new article on leaked albums or something.  By your logic, we should also be indicating which films were being put onto the net illegaly, or which 2004 movies had Oscar screeners uploaded on BitTorrent in the past 2 months.  It's just very pedestrian knowledge at best. --Madchester 16:56, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)
 * There's one step from music to file sharing (and there's quite an article about file sharing), so I thought the leaking of an album wasnt worth just a foot note. I'll erase every notion of an album being leaked noted from now when I find them, cause I am pro consistency in articles among each other, thats all really. If you disagree about that too, please tell. --J. 21.18 2005 Feb 20

Hidden track
I'm editing the part about the hidden track. It plays in my boombox just fine, so apparently iTunes is not needed. --Charron 02:12, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

No Samples
The article repeats the old story about Hotel being Moby's first album not to include vocal samples. I'm not aware that Animal Rights has any - or am I wrong? Gadsby West 02:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

 * Ambient doesn't so far's I recall. -- David Spalding ( ☎   ✉   ✍  ) 14:10, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:MobyHotel.jpg
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If there is other other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 00:07, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:MobyHotel.jpg
Image:MobyHotel.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 04:21, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

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title: Talk:Hotel (album)


text: Category:Mountains of Texas

title: Category:Mountains of Texas


text:
Check (chess)

In chess and similar games, check is a condition that occurs when a player's king is under threat of on the opponent's next turn. A king so threatened is said to be in check. A player must get out of check if possible by moving the king to an unattacked square, interposing a piece between the threatening piece and the king, or capturing the threatening piece. If the player cannot remove the check by any of these options, the game ends in checkmate and the player loses. Players cannot make any move that puts their own king in check.

Overview
A check is the result of a move that places the opposing king under an immediate threat of capture by one (or occasionally two) of the player's pieces. Making a move that checks is sometimes called "giving check". Even if a piece is pinned against the player's own king, it may still give check. For example, in the diagrammed position, White has just played Be4+, simultaneously giving check and blocking the check from Black's rook. Black must now address the check; the fact that the bishop cannot legally move is irrelevant. If the king is in check and the checked player has no legal move to get out of check, the king is checkmated and the player loses.

Under the standard rules of chess, a player may not make any move that places or leaves their king in check. A player may move the king, capture the threatening piece, or block the check with another piece. A king cannot itself directly check the opposing king, since this would place the first king in check as well. A move of the king could expose the opposing king to a discovered check by another piece, however.

In fast chess, depending on the rules in effect, placing or leaving one's king in check may result in immediate loss of the game.

Getting out of check
There may be up to three ways to get a king out of a single check (check delivered by just one enemy piece):
 * 1) . This is done with either the king or another piece. If the checking piece is adjacent to the king, the king can capture the piece if the king does not move into a new check (i.e. if the piece is not protected by another enemy piece). Likewise, a piece that is pinned to the king cannot capture the checking piece since such a move would uncover a check to the king.
 * 2) . The king is moved to an adjacent square where it is not in check. The king is not allowed to castle when it is in check. The king may capture an enemy piece in a move to get out of check, as long as the piece is not protected.
 * 3) . Also called interposing, is possible only if the checking piece is a queen, rook, or bishop and there is at least one empty square in the line between the checking piece and the checked king. Blocking a check is done by moving a piece to one such empty square. (The blocking piece is then pinned to the king by the attacking piece.)

In the position in the diagram, White can get out of check by any of three methods:
 * 1) Capturing the attacking piece by the move Nxa2.
 * 2) Moving the king to any unattacked square (marked with "x"); namely, Kd6, Ke5, or Ke7.
 * 3) Blocking the check by the move Rc4 or Nd5.

If a king is placed in double check, the king must get out of both checks on the following move. Since it is impossible to capture both checking pieces or block both lines of attack in a single move, a double check can be escaped only by moving the king.

Types of checks
Sometimes a given check is part of a chess tactic such as a fork, a skewer, or a discovered attack on another piece. In some cases, a check can be used to defend against such tactics.

There are also a few more special types of check:
 * Discovered check. A discovered check is similar to any other type of discovered attack except that it is a discovered attack on the opposing king. In a discovered check, a piece moves out of the line of attack by another piece so that this other piece (which can be a queen, rook, or bishop) is then checking the opponent's king. A discovered check could be a tactic in itself because the piece that moved could attack or otherwise threaten another piece. The opponent has to get out of the discovered check on the following move and may not be able to also thwart the attack by the other piece that moved.
 * Double check. A double check is a check from two pieces to the opponent's king in a single move. This happens when a moved piece attacks the king, resulting in a second piece giving check by discovered check. It can also happen, though very rarely, when an en passant capture opens two lines of attack simultaneously. A double check cannot be blocked, nor can it be met by capturing one of the checking pieces (unless the king itself makes the capture), because both checking pieces cannot be captured or blocked in one move. Therefore, a double check forces the king to make a move. In algebraic chess notation, a double check move is sometimes noted with a "++" after the written move in place of the usual "+", although "++" has been used to indicate checkmate (along with "#").
 * Cross-check. When a check is answered by a check, particularly when this second check is delivered by a piece blocking the first, it is called a cross-check. In fact, a "cross-checkmate" is also possible in that way (that is, to answer a check with a checkmate); but since no such term is in common use, it would be called cross-check as well.

History
The idea of warning that the king was under attack (announcing "check" in modern terminology) is present in the earliest descriptions of chess rules, in Persian/Arabian manuscripts. This was done to avoid the early and accidental end of a game. Later the Persians added the additional rule that a king could not be moved into check or left in check. As a result, the king could not be captured.

In this usage, the words "check" and "chess" come via Arabic from Persian shāh, meaning "king" or "monarch".

Less commonly (and obsolete), the warning garde can be said when a player directly attacks the opponent's queen in a similar way. This was mostly abandoned in the 19th century. A move can be both check and garde simultaneously. Before the queen acquired its current move (about 1495) the rook was the most powerful piece. At that time the term check-rook was used for a move that checked the king and attacked a rook at the same time.

Until the early 20th century a player was expected to announce "check" when making a checking move, and some sources of rules even allowed a player to ignore an unannounced check.

Modern practice
In informal games, most players still announce "check"; however, this is no longer required under the rules of chess and is not encouraged in formal games. In the FIDE rules for rapid chess, if a player leaves or places their king in check or commits any other illegal move, their opponent can claim a win.

In algebraic chess notation, a "+" is normally written after a checking move. A minority of publications, most notably ECO, omit any mention of check.

Checking in tactics and strategy
Sometimes checking an opponent provides no benefit to the checking player. This is called a "useless check" and it may even provide the checked opponent with a tempo (move opportunity) to move the king into a safer position. For example, 1.e4 e6 2.d4 Bb4+ does nothing for Black and in fact causes him to lose a tempo after 3.c3 A check given with the sole intention of delaying an inevitable defeat by one move is referred to as a "spite check", and may be considered somewhat unsporting.

There are many instances, however, when checking the opponent's king may be a useful tactic or part of a tactic, either in attacking or in defense. Checking is often used in combinations with many other tactics or simply to an opponent into a position where their king can be checkmated, otherwise taken advantage of, or is otherwise worse for the opponent. Some attacks involve numerous checks to force an opponent into a losing position, especially when the king is exposed.

Some uses of checking:
 * Repetitive checking to prevent losing the game (draw by perpetual check)
 * Royal fork (fork of the king and queen) or other forks involving the king
 * Forcing an exchange
 * Preventing castling by forcing the king to move
 * Opening a line of attack by another piece (discovered attack)
 * Limiting the opponent's response to a move by moving with a discovered check
 * Forcing the king to clear the way to capturing another piece (absolute skewer)
 * Pushing a defending piece into an absolute pin
 * Deflecting the king from protecting a piece or pawn
 * Escaping a trap (e.g. a fork)
 * Gaining a tempo

title: Check (chess)


text:
Talk:Jan Matejko

Untitled
I cannot find the word "batalistic" in any dictionary. Is it a word? If yes, what does it mean? MeToo 23:27, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

Date of birth
H. M. Słoczyński in his book "Matejko" (2000): July 28, ofen mistake is June 24, Matejko himself said he was born on July 30 (quote from pl:Matejko article). A.J. 18:54, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Krakau
Should not Krakow be called Krakau for the time of Matejko as per Gdansk vote? --Irpen 04:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Not any more than we should use Moskwa for Moscow around 1612. It is not border territory and as such is not affected by Gdansk vote.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 06:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It is affected by our naming policy, though. Likewise, Warsaw should be changed to Varshava. -- Ghirla -трёп-  15:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Ghirlandajo, in that case I must ask you why you deleted the Polish spelling for Smolensk? Appleseed (Talk) 16:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Because I don't demand to list Russian spelling of Warsaw in the first line of the article about that city. Furthermore, the town never was Polish. Lithuanian? Perhaps. Thirdly, the Russian and Polish versions of the placename are identical. -- Ghirla -трёп-  18:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where the Polish language was used. As for the toponyms being identical, I believe you missed a diacritic. Appleseed (Talk) 18:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * According to the discussion we had on proposed NC for toponyms, what matters most is not what was a part of what else but whether the name is used in English language sources. There is no such usage of Smolensk with a diactric. -Irpen 18:55, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It is fun to deal with an opponent like Appleseed who is not lazy to spend time uncovering diffs from years and month ago. But here is the reason and here is why this is similar to Gdansk. Both Danzig and Krakau are used in English sources in contemporary context. --Irpen 18:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Irpen, I don't understand why you consider me your opponent. We are all collaborating to create an encyclopedia. I wish you would view it from this perspective. Appleseed (Talk) 18:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I know, it's just always fun to see diffs from years ago suddenly brought up. I know how time consuming it is to uncover that and admire your effort. --Irpen 18:55, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Irpen, this issue belong at Talk:Kraków. If you want to discuss it further, please bring it there and notify relevant noticeboards. Appleseed, I don't think the difference between Smolensk and Smoleńsk is worth loosing any sleep over, and anyway this will soon be addressed by Naming conventions (geographic names).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:42, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Piotrus, we are not talking here about the usage in Krakow. We are talking about the usage in Matejko. Or are you saying that modern Polish spelling is to be used for the city in all historic periods? The differencw with Moskwa in 1612 is that no English source uses Moskwa for 1612 and plenty use Krakau in the context of the 19th century, similarly to Danzig for the interwar time. If Lwow and Wilno is used for the Polish time around here, why double standards and no Krakau? --Irpen 18:55, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Because Kraków is also widely used for that period, as simple as that. Compare: Kraków+Matejko: 165 books, Krakau+Matejko: 46 books.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 19:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

School and Academy
Is School of Fine Arts the same as Academy of Fine Arts?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 17:39, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's previus name of Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, see pl: article. A.J. 20:38, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Jan Matejko's deep national inferiority complex
I noticed that there are many paintings of Jan Matejko where Eastern Slavs are presented kneeing und begging. I counted already five or six of them. Some are especially historically questionable during episodes like the Siege of Pskov. It looks like Matejko, who lived in times when Poland was under Russian rule, had a big national inferiority complex and tried to portray what he saw as historical Russian subordination to powerful and superiour Poles. Maybe he wanted to comfort his compatriots with such an exaggerated embodiment. For me, it looks pretty primitive and wild since I can't imagine any Russian who would seriously extract satisfaction from kitschy pictures of abject enemies. Russians portrayed their enemies mostly with respect. Looks like Poles have much in common with Americans and their dumpy self-glorification style. Shouldn't we mention Jan Matejko's inferiority complex in the article? Voyevoda 15:27, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

In the Prussian Homage, Matejko also portrayed a German as kneeling. It's interesting that mostly his late 19th century paintings are used to illustrate many medieval kings. Are no other pictures available, or if so, are they not heroic enough?-- Matthead discuß!    O       16:21, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Regarding recent revert warring over removal of this thread: as much as I agree with the description of this thread here, I see Wikipedia's talk page as an archive that should preferably not be changed. Let those posts stay here, so the researchers in few decades may more easily pour over them and study nationalism and trolling.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:07, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

His favorite dish was dumplings with plums.
Does this really belong in the article? It isn't sourced and what is the relevance? I didn't make the edit, because I might just be missing something. I don't know much about Matejko beyond the paintings I have seen.DoctorLazarusLong (talk) 18:34, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think you're missing anything. I've removed it.  Rojomoke (talk) 06:16, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

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title: Talk:Jan Matejko


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Steven Fishman

Steven Fishman (born 1949) is an American former Scientologist whose inclusion of Scientology's secret Operating Thetan levels in a court filing led to the first public confirmation by the Church of Scientology of its doctrines regarding Xenu and the Wall of Fire.

Fishman was serving a 21-year sentence on charges of wire fraud and money laundering, and was scheduled to be released on October 28, 2028. He was released on January 8, 2021.

Fraud scheme
The origins of Fishman's dispute with the Church of Scientology lay in a fraud scheme he conducted from 1983 to 1988. Fishman joined dozens of class action lawsuits by presenting stock purchase confirmations he had stolen from his employer and forged. In this manner, he made approximately one million dollars, as much as 30 percent of which he spent on Scientology materials and services. Fishman was arrested in July 1988 and charged with several counts of fraud. The FBI also investigated the possibility of church involvement in the scheme.

Fishman's attorney, Marc Nurik, had planned to use an insanity defense, offering false memory syndrome theorist Richard Ofshe and psychologist Margaret Singer as expert witnesses. Fishman sat for a seven-part videotaped interview with Ofshe and Nurik. In the interview, he discussed in detail various aspects of Scientology doctrine, his own Scientology involvement, and the church's response to his arrest. Fishman claimed that church staff had ordered him to murder his psychologist, Uwe Geertz, who had knowledge of his Scientology involvement, and then to commit suicide.

At the same time, according to Fishman, he participated in a conspiracy with church staff to deflect accusations of church involvement, by submitting fake documents and making false statements to his defense team. For these acts he was further charged with obstruction of justice. The court ultimately blocked Nurik's defense strategy by rejecting both expert witnesses, based on the testimony of opposing expert Dick Anthony. Fishman pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of obstruction, and the court sentenced him on July 20, 1990, to five years imprisonment in the Butner Federal Correctional Institution. Fishman later claimed that the church hired Scientologist inmate Luis Martinez to kill him in prison. He was paroled in mid-1993.

According to Anthony, who had opposed Ofshe and Singer, Fishman's criminal case was one of several in which they had attempted to introduce their ideas of coercive persuasion by religious groups. The court's admissibility ruling came as a setback to American critics of cults. Ofshe and Singer sued Anthony unsuccessfully, claiming that he mischaracterized the basis of their theories in this and other cases.

Libel case
In 1991, while Fishman was still incarcerated, Time magazine published a highly critical cover story on Scientology by Richard Behar. The story mentioned Fishman's fraud conviction and the alleged plot to eliminate him and Geertz. The church responded by filing libel lawsuits against Time Warner, Behar, and Fishman and Geertz jointly.

In support of his contention that he had been brainwashed and ordered to murder Geertz, Fishman attached a series of documents to a motion to reconsider venue. This filing has since become known as the Fishman Affidavit. It included purported Scientology documents describing obstructionist tactics to use in the event of an arrest, as well as versions of Operating Thetan levels I through VII and purported excerpts of OT VIII. Fishman's filing placed the advanced materials on record at the district court, available for viewing by the general public. Despite an unsuccessful church motion to seal the court record and efforts to keep the court files continuously checked out, former Scientologist Arnaldo Lerma obtained the affidavit and posted it on the internet, after which it spread uncontrollably. In the process of suing Lerma for copyright infringement, the church confirmed that the copies of levels I through VII were accurate.

A federal district court summarily dismissed the church's claims against Time Warner and Behar, finding that they had not acted with actual malice insofar as the church was concerned. The church dropped its claims against Fishman and Geertz after Geertz's legal team served subpoenas upon such Scientologist celebrities as Kelly Preston, Juliette Lewis and Isaac Hayes. The court record in the Fishman case remained open to the public.

Wollersheim litigation
Fishman submitted a declaration on behalf of Lawrence Wollersheim in 1993, claiming firsthand knowledge of tactics the Church had used to interfere with Wollersheim's lawsuit against the church. In the declaration (affidavit), Fishman alleged the Church had drowned the trial judge's dog and made harassing phone calls to Wollersheim at night.

Authenticity of Fishman's Church History
A substantial amount of controversy regarding Fishman's involvement with the Church of Scientology has emerged in the decades since the affair. The allegations calling Fishman's involvement into question initially came solely from the Church (CoS) itself and their legal representation, who pursued the libel suit after discovering that he was not in their member data or records. In August 2015, prolific Scientology critic and investigator Tony Ortega published an exposé on the Fishman Case; in which he characterizes Steven Fishman as a "squirrel" (or Independent Scientologist). He describes Fishman as follows:

"'Actual longtime Scientologists will tell you that the material in [Fishman's] book, as well as Fishman's statements on his notorious set of videos (recorded by his attorney to prove to the court that Fishman was a lunatic) prove that Fishman was never a Scientologist, but a nutcase who had amassed a huge library of Scientology materials which he studied closely so he could talk as though he knew what he was talking about — at least to the uninitiated.'"

In addition to there being no historical Scientology completions for Steven Fishman listed, produced, or published, many since-apostatized Scientologists named in Fishman's self-published memoir, Lonesome Squirrel, have categorically refuted the events of the book mentioning them, and denied having known him altogether. Fishman himself has long asserted that he received OT levels I to VII and VIII respectively from two Sea Org members on separate instances. Ortega, though professing skepticism regarding this, states that he believes the OT-VIII document to be authentic nonetheless.

"As we began reading 'Lonesome Squirrel,' we realized that some of the people named in it have, 20 years later, come out of the church. So we reached out to them and they confirmed for us that nothing in the book associated with them actually happened. 'Lonesome Squirrel' is an incredibly creative work of fiction that has enough actual names and locations and quotations from L. Ron Hubbard's work that it has a veneer of authenticity."

title: Steven Fishman


text:
The Greek Myths

The Greek Myths (1955) is a mythography, a compendium of Greek mythology, with comments and analyses, by the poet and writer Robert Graves. Many editions of the book separate it into two volumes. Abridged editions of the work contain only the myths and leave out Graves's commentary.

Each myth is presented in the voice of a narrator writing under the Antonines, such as Plutarch or Pausanias, with citations of the classical sources. The literary quality of his retellings is generally praised. Following each retelling, Graves presents his interpretation of its origin and significance, influenced by his belief in a prehistoric Matriarchal religion, as discussed in his book The White Goddess and elsewhere. Graves's theories and etymologies are rejected by most classical scholars. Graves argued in response that classical scholars lack "the poetic capacity to forensically examine mythology".

Contents
Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society under the Pelasgians to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them.

The Greek Myths presents the myths as stories from the ritual of all three stages, and often as historical records of the otherwise unattested struggles between Greek kings and the Moon-priestesses. In some cases Graves conjectures a process of "iconotropy", or image-turning, by which a hypothetical cult image of the matriarchal or matrilineal period has been misread by later Greeks in their own terms. Thus, for example, he conjectures an image of divine twins struggling in the womb of the Horse-Goddess, which later gave rise to the myth of the Trojan Horse.

Pelasgian creation myth
Graves's imaginatively reconstructed "Pelasgian creation myth" features a supreme creatrix, Eurynome, "The Goddess of All Things", who rises naked from Chaos to part sea from sky so that she can dance upon the waves. Catching the north wind at her back and rubbing it between her hands, she warms the pneuma and spontaneously generates the serpent Ophion, who mates with her. In the form of a dove upon the waves she lays the Cosmic Egg and bids Ophion to incubate it by coiling seven times around until it splits in two and hatches "all things that exist ... sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures".

In the soil of Arcadia the Pelasgians spring up from Ophion's teeth, scattered under the heel of Eurynome, who kicked the serpent from their home on Mount Olympus for his boast of having created all things. Eurynome, whose name means "wide wandering", sets male and female Titans for each wandering planet: Theia and Hyperion for the Sun; Phoebe and Atlas for the Moon; Metis and Coeus for Mercury; Tethys and Oceanus for Venus; Dione and Crius for Mars; Themis and Eurymedon for Jupiter; and Rhea and Cronus for Saturn.

Also included are the Homeric, Orphic and Olympian creation myths, as well as two "philosophical" creation myths.

Olympian creation myth
Graves offers his interpretation of “The Olympian Creation Myth” in a brief summary. In this interpretation, Mother Earth is the creator of the Earth as it is known, with water, greenery, and animal life. This creation of Earth was possible through the “fertile rain” cast over her by her son Uranus, whom the goddess birthed while asleep after emerging from Chaos. Mother Earth goes on in this retelling to give birth to six “children of semi-human form.” Three of these children are the Hundred-Handed Ones and the other three the Cyclopes. The role played by the children of Mother Earths three original Cyclopes' offspring is specified by the author as he explains the interaction they would eventually have with the mythological figure of Odysseus.

Reception
Graves's retellings have been widely praised as imaginative and poetic, but the scholarship behind his hypotheses and conclusions is generally criticised as idiosyncratic and untenable.

Ted Hughes and other poets have found the system of The White Goddess congenial; The Greek Myths contains about a quarter of that system, and does not include the method of composing poems.

The Greek Myths has been heavily criticised both during and after the lifetime of the author. Critics have deprecated Graves's personal interpretations, which are, in the words of one of them, "either the greatest single contribution that has ever been made to the interpretation of Greek myth or else a farrago of cranky nonsense; I fear that it would be impossible to find any classical scholar who would agree with the former diagnosis". Graves's etymologies have been questioned, and his largely intuitive division between "true myth" and other sorts of story has been viewed as arbitrary, taking myths out of the context in which we now find them. The basic assumption that explaining mythology requires any "general hypothesis", whether Graves's or some other, has also been disputed. The work has been called a compendium of misinterpretations. Sibylle Ihm refers to Graves's "creative mishandling of the Greek myths." Robin Hard called it "comprehensive and attractively written," but added that "the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author's personal mythology". The Disraeli scholar Michel Pharand replies that "Graves's theories and conclusions, outlandish as they seemed to his contemporaries (or may appear to us), were the result of careful observation."

H. J. Rose, agreeing with several of the above critics, questions the scholarship of the retellings. Graves presents The Greek Myths as an updating of William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (originally published 1844), which Graves calls "the standard work in English", never brought up to date; Rose is dismayed to find no sign that Graves had heard of the Oxford Classical Dictionary or any of the "various compendia of mythology, written in, or translated into, our tongue since 1844". Rose finds many omissions and some clear errors, most seriously Graves's ascribing to Sophocles the argument of his Ajax (Graves §168.4); this evaluation has been repeated by other critics since.

Graves himself was well aware of scholarly mistrust of The Greek Myths. In a letter to Ava Gardner, he wrote:

"I am not a Greek scholar or an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a comparative mythologist, but I have a good nose and a sense of touch, and think I have connected a lot of mythical patterns which were not connected before, Classical faculties will hate me, and I will get a lot of sniffy reviews."

Editions

 * In two volumes (Penguin Books nos 1026 and 1027), 370 pp. and 410 pp. respectively, with maps in each volume and an index in Vol. 2; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955; reprinted with amendments 1957; revised edition 1960; numerous reprintings
 * in one volume (Penguin Classics) 793 pp, 2012. ISBN 978-0143106715. ePub ISBN 978-1101580509

title: The Greek Myths