En Passant / Google En Passant

About

En Passant is a notorious chess move in which a pawn that moves two spaces forward is able to be captured by an adjacent pawn. The move is particularly infamous among new players of the game as something that is not understood at first when starting out the game — often leading to people accusing their opponent of cheating or generally being confused. Since chess moved to the online sphere, countless blogs, forum threads and bug reports have been filed about the move from unsuspecting players, leading to the popularization of the catchphrase "Google En Passant" to become a meme within the community.

Origin

En Passant, translated from French meaning "In Passing," is a chess move where pawns moving two spaces forward are capturable by an adjacent pawn. In chess terms, this would mean moving a pawn from C7 to C5 and then being captured by the enemy pawn at D5, which moves to D4. The addition of En Passant to chess took place roughly 400 years ago, notably making it the most recent move added to the game, as well as one of the most confusing for new players.

References and memes about the notorious move began appearing online around the mid-2010s, particularly the phrase "Google 'en passant'" appearing whenever someone claimed the move was cheating. For example, one of the earliest known uses of the catchphrase appeared in a comment chain on The Chive^[4] posted under a video of a speedy chess match on January 22nd, 2016 (seen below).

Then on September 17th, 2018, after years of bug reports, Chess.com staff member Erik^[1] uploaded a post to the site going over En Passant and the reports they've gotten because of it. The explanation also included numerous memes throughout the article (example shown below).

Spread

Over the following years heading into the early 2020s, En Passant continued to grow as a meme as more people got into chess for the first time and summarily accused their opponents or AI of cheating when getting blindsided by the move. On February 21st, 2022, Redditor King-Doofy^[2] uploaded a meme to the /r/AnarchyChess subreddit (which notably became a prominent community for using the catchphrase "Google En Passant") including a POV meme of someone who got "En Passanted" for the first time, accumulating over 4,500 upvotes in two years (shown below).

On January 22nd, 2023, the official Chess.com Twitter^[3] account asked its followers what the number one thing they would suggest to new players is, to which the community (several years deep into the meme) unanimously decided to put "Google En Passant" as the answer, causing the phrase to see a resurgence and be subsequently spread all over social media and in memes again (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References