Reference
Chess notation: how to read and write chess moves
Every chess game ever published — and the move list beside your board when you play on Knight Boards — is written in algebraic notation: a compact code like Nf3 or exd5 that records a whole game in a few lines. It looks cryptic; it takes about ten minutes to learn. Here's the whole system.
The grid: files and ranks
Every square has a name made of a letter and a number. The columns, called files, are lettered a to h from White's left to White's right. The rows, called ranks, are numbered 1 to 8 starting from White's side of the board.
So White's king starts on e1, Black's on e8, and the square marked in the diagram is e4 — file e, rank 4. The names never change, no matter which side of the board you're sitting on.
That last point is the one beginners trip over. If you are playing Black, the board is upside down from your view, but a1 is still the dark square in White's bottom-left corner. Square names belong to the board, not to the player looking at it.
One letter per piece: what does N mean in chess?
Each piece gets a capital letter — except the pawn, which gets none:
- K — king ♚
- Q — queen ♛
- R — rook ♜
- B — bishop ♝
- N — knight ♞ (K was taken)
- — pawn ♟ (no letter at all)
N is the knight. It is the one letter that isn't the first letter of its piece, and it catches everybody out once. The king claimed K first, so the knight took the next unmistakable letter from its own name. If you see N anywhere in a game score — Nf3, Nxe5, Nbd7 — a knight is moving.
A move is simply the piece letter plus the destination square. Nf3 means "a knight moves to f3". e4 — no letter — means "a pawn moves to e4". Where the piece came from is usually left out, because only one piece of that kind can legally get there.
The letters are English, and they change from language to language: a German book writes S for Springer where an English one writes N. That is exactly why computers use figurine or coordinate notation instead — no letters to translate.
What does Nf3 mean in chess?
Nf3 means a knight moves to the square f3. Read it in two halves: N is the piece — a knight — and f3 is where it lands.
Nothing says which knight, and nothing says where it came from, because it doesn't need to. From the starting position only the knight on g1 can reach f3 at all, so naming the destination is enough to identify the move completely.
It is also one of the most common opening moves in chess: it develops a piece, controls the central squares e5 and d4, and clears the way for White to castle. When both knights can reach the same square, notation adds a letter to say which — see Rad1 and disambiguation below.
Captures, checks and checkmate
Three symbols carry most of the drama:
- x — a capture. Bxe5: a bishop captures whatever stood on e5. Notice that notation never says what was captured — you work that out from the position.
- + — check. Qh5+: the queen moves to h5 and attacks the king.
- # — checkmate. Qxf7# ends the game on the spot.
Pawn captures are the special case. A pawn has no letter, so if it captured you would be left with just a destination square and no way to tell which pawn moved. Instead the pawn is named by the file it started on: exd5 means "the pawn on the e-file captures on d5". You will see this constantly, and it is the single most common thing beginners misread.
Castling and promotion
Castling gets its own symbols: O-O for castling short (with the h-side rook) and O-O-O for castling long (with the a-side rook). An easy way to remember which is which: the longer symbol is the longer castle. They are written with capital letter O's, though you will often see zeros (0-0) in older books and in PGN files.
When a pawn reaches the last rank and promotes, the new piece is written after an equals sign: e8=Q — the e-pawn arrives on e8 and becomes a queen. Promotions are often checks too, so you'll see the symbols stack: e8=Q+. You can promote to a rook, bishop or knight instead — e8=N+ is a real and occasionally winning move — which is covered in the full chess rules.
En passant captures are written like any other pawn capture — exd6 — sometimes with e.p. added for clarity. The destination is the square the pawn lands on, not the square the captured pawn was sitting on.
What does Rad1 mean? Two pieces, one square
Rad1 means the rook on the a-file moves to d1. The extra a is doing real work: in the position shown, rooks on a1 and f1 can both legally reach d1. Writing just Rd1 would be ambiguous, so notation adds the file the moving rook started on.
This is called disambiguation, and it follows three rules in order:
- If the two pieces are on different files, add the file: Rad1.
- If they share a file, add the rank instead: R1d2.
- If somehow neither settles it — possible with three queens after a promotion — write both: Qh4e1.
The same applies to any piece that comes in pairs, so you will also meet Nbd7 (the knight on the b-file goes to d7) and Ngf3. Disambiguation only ever appears when it is genuinely needed — if only one rook can reach d1, it is simply Rd1. You will read these far more often than you will need to write them.
Not sure whether you needed it? Paste the game into the notation checker — if a move is ambiguous it will say so, and tell you which two moves you were choosing between.
Every chess notation symbol in one table
The complete set. The first group changes what the move is; the second is commentary added afterwards by whoever annotated the game, and never appears in a live move list.
| Symbol | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| K Q R B N | King, queen, rook, bishop, knight. A pawn has no letter. | Qd8 |
| x | Captures. | Bxe5 |
| + | Check. | Qh5+ |
| # | Checkmate — the game ends here. | Qxf7# |
| ++ | Double check: two pieces attack the king at once, so only a king move can answer it. Some older books use ++ for checkmate. | Nf6++ |
| O-O | Castles kingside (short). | O-O |
| O-O-O | Castles queenside (long). | O-O-O |
| = | Promotes to the piece named after it. | e8=Q |
| e.p. | Captured en passant. Optional — the move is legal notation without it. | exd6 e.p. |
| 1-0 | White won. | 1-0 |
| 0-1 | Black won. | 0-1 |
| ½-½ | Draw. | ½-½ |
| ! | A strong move. | Nd5! |
| ? | A weak move — a mistake. | Nf6? |
| !! | A brilliant move. | Qxh7!! |
| ?? | A blunder — a game-losing error. | Nf6?? |
| !? | An interesting move worth considering. | Bc4!? |
| ?! | A dubious move — probably not best. | h6?! |
| ± ∓ | White (or Black) stands clearly better. | ± |
| … | Marks a Black move quoted on its own. | 12… Nc6 |
Want just the table? The chess notation symbols cheat sheet is the same reference on a page of its own, built to keep open beside a board.
Worked examples: reading a full game score
Moves are numbered in pairs — White's move, then Black's. Here is the fastest checkmate every beginner should recognise, the scholar's mate, as a game score:
1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6?? 4. Qxf7#
Read it aloud: pawn to e4, pawn to e5; bishop to c4, knight to c6; queen to h5, knight to f6; queen takes on f7, checkmate. Black's third move ignores the threat and loses at once — hence the ??.
Now one with a capture and a castle in it:
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. O-O
Move 4 is the pair to watch. Bxc6 — the bishop captures on c6. Black answers dxc6: a pawn recaptures, and because pawns are named by their file we know it was the d-pawn, not the b-pawn. White then plays O-O, castling short. This opening is the Ruy Lopez, and those five lines describe it completely.
And one showing disambiguation and promotion together:
28. Rad1 Rfe8 29. b8=Q+ Rxb8 30. Rxd7 ½-½
Rad1 and Rfe8 both disambiguate — a-file rook to d1, f-file rook to e8. b8=Q+ promotes a pawn to a queen with check, Black captures it straight back, and ½-½ records the agreed draw.
PGN, FEN and the older systems
Everything above is algebraic notation, the official system of FIDE and the one used by essentially every modern book, site and app. A few related systems are worth recognising when you meet them.
Descriptive notation
The old English system, standard until roughly the 1970s. Squares were named from each player's own point of view, so the same square had two names and moves looked like P-K4 or N-KB3. If you pick up a second-hand chess book and cannot read a word of it, this is why. It is obsolete — learn algebraic instead.
Long algebraic
Writes the starting square as well as the destination: Ng1-f3 instead of Nf3. Longer, but never ambiguous, so it turns up in teaching material and on scoresheets.
PGN
Portable Game Notation is how games are stored in files. It is ordinary algebraic notation plus a header of tags — players, date, result — so a program can read it. If you have ever downloaded a .pgn file, you already know how to read the moves inside it.
FEN and UCI
FEN describes a single position rather than a game — one line of text giving every piece, whose turn it is and what castling is still allowed. UCI is what chess engines speak between themselves: pure coordinates, g1f3, with no piece letters to translate between languages.
Writing a game down by hand
In any tournament game you are required to record the moves yourself, on a scoresheet with numbered lines and two columns. Write your move after you play it, one line per move pair, and keep the numbers aligned with the printed ones — the commonest error is drifting a line out of step, which makes the whole sheet unreadable.
Three habits make it painless: write the piece letter as a capital so B for bishop never reads as b the file; record checks and captures as you go rather than reconstructing them later; and if you lose track, stop and copy the position from the board rather than guessing. Online you never have to think about any of this — the move list writes itself.
Chess notation questions
What does Nf3 mean in chess? +
Nf3 means a knight moves to the square f3. N is the letter for knight (K was already taken by the king) and f3 is the destination square — file f, rank 3. The square the knight came from is not written, because normally only one knight can legally reach f3.
What does N stand for in chess notation? +
N stands for knight. The king already uses K, so the knight takes the next clearest letter from its name. The full set is K for king, Q for queen, R for rook, B for bishop and N for knight. Pawns have no letter at all — a move written as just a square, like e4, is a pawn move.
What does Rad1 mean in chess? +
Rad1 means the rook on the a-file moves to d1. The extra letter is there because both rooks could legally reach d1, so notation adds the moving rook's file to say which one went. If the two rooks share a file instead, the rank is added — R1d2. This is called disambiguation, and it is only ever used when the move would otherwise be ambiguous.
What does x mean in chess notation? +
x means a capture. Bxe5 is a bishop capturing whatever stood on e5. When a pawn captures it is named by the file it started on, so exd5 means the pawn on the e-file captured on d5.
What does ++ mean in chess? +
++ means double check — both of a player's pieces attack the king at once, usually because a piece moved out of the way and revealed an attack behind it. A double check can only be answered by moving the king, since no single block or capture can stop two attackers. Some older books use ++ to mean checkmate instead, where modern notation uses #.
What is chess notation called? +
The standard system is called algebraic notation, and it is the official notation of FIDE, the international chess federation. Games stored in files use a machine-readable form of it called PGN. An older system called descriptive notation, which named squares like K-KB3, was used in English books until roughly the 1970s and is no longer standard.
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