Cheque

--- CONTENT ---
The cheque (usually cheque or check in Switzerland) is a means of payment in which the payee instructs a credit institution to pay a certain amount of money to a payee at the expense of the issuer’s checking account.

General
In the cheque there are at least three participants, namely the issuer (debtor), the credit institution as the recipient and the payee (also beneficiary, issuer) as the creditor.

The check is a security, specifically a born order paper of the HGB. It is therefore transmitted by means of indossament. The money order can be on cash withdrawal (bar check) or on account credit (settlement check). The check is a deed that leads to a deed process in case of disputes. In practice, credit institutions usually use individual bearer checks, which make the check a de facto bearer’s document, which can be transferred without indossament. A check is form-bound, but not form-bound.

The main difference to the bill of exchange is that the issuer of a check can only specify as the name of the person who is to pay (related bank) a credit institution with which the issuer holds a bank balance or credit line. A cheque therefore serves – unlike the bill of exchange – not the credit transactions, but exclusively the payment transactions. In addition, the cashing of a check can be refused by the bank in order to avoid, for example, an overdraft. In order to avoid this uncertainty, various forms of guaranteed checks have been introduced in practice. The most famous example of a guaranteed cheque was the Eurocheque, which was customary until 1 January 2002.

Check and bill of exchange have lost their former significance as a monetary substitute in many countries today, even in Germany the check is hardly used anymore.

Etymology
The word “check” was introduced in the middle of the 19th century. From English to German. Initially, the usual spelling check in American English competed and the since the 18. 19th century in British English preferred form cheque, both of which are still common in Swiss High German today. In Germany, however, from 1908 the Germanized form Scheck prevailed, which was previously proposed by Konrad Duden and recommended in 1899 by the General German Language Association to the legislature.

The origin of the English word is not conclusively clarified. The etymological dictionary of the German language favors the hypothesis, advocated by Enno Littmann and Karl Lokotsch, among others, that the word is derived in Arabic (plural), which in Islamic banking refers to interest-free bonds, specifically also the written payment instructions. Other authors suspect the origin of the word in chess (old French echecs, ultimately to Persian šāh ): check bezei