How Do You Pronounce “Draughts”?
Draughts is pronounced "drafts", rhyming with rafts. The gh is completely silent. In southern British English it is /drɑːfts/, with the long a of "grass"; further north, and in most other accents, the shorter /dræfts/ does the same job. Either way, nobody says "drorts" or "drouts", however strongly the spelling suggests it.
If it helps, "draughts" and "drafts" are the same word wearing different clothes. American English tidied the spelling up; British English kept the original. The sound never changed.
What does "draughts" mean?
Draughts is the British name for the board game played on the dark squares of an 8×8 board, where twelve men a side jump and capture each other until one player runs out of pieces or moves. North Americans know the identical game as checkers. If you want to see it rather than read about it, you can play draughts online free right on our homepage.
The singular noun has a whole family of other meanings in British English, all spelt the same way and all said "draft": a current of air slipping under the door, beer served from the cask ("on draught"), the depth a ship sits in the water, and a long swallow of a drink. Context does the sorting; nobody orders a pint of board games.
Why is it spelt like that?
Blame the Middle Ages. The gh in "draught" once stood for a real sound, a rasp at the back of the throat that English has since lost. In some words that sound faded to nothing, as in "though"; in others it softened into an f, as in "laugh", "rough" and "enough". "Draught" took the f route, but the spelling had already set like concrete, so the letters stayed while the sound moved on.
The word itself is an old noun formed from "draw", and a draught was, in the broadest sense, an act of drawing: a breath drawn in, a drink drawn from a barrel, a load drawn by a horse. The usual dictionary account of the game's name follows the same thread. Moving a piece was "drawing" it, a single move was a draught, and a game made of such moves became draughts. The plural stuck as the name.
American English later regularised the spelling of the whole word family to "draft", which is why a US bar sells draft beer while a London pub sells draught. The game, though, took a different path entirely over there: it got a new name altogether.
So why do Americans say checkers?
"Checkers" describes the board rather than the moves: a chequered field of alternating squares. Same game, two vantage points, and neither name is more correct. The game they describe is far older than either word; historians of the board trace the European draughts family back to the twelfth century, probably beginning in France or Spain, long before English speakers on either side of the Atlantic argued about what to call it.
Whichever name you grew up with, the moves are identical: men go diagonally forward, captures are compulsory, and a piece reaching the far row is crowned. The full rules of draughts take about five minutes to learn.
The quick recap
- Say "drafts". It rhymes with rafts, and the gh is silent.
- The word comes from "draw": a draught was a move, so the game of moves became draughts.
- British English kept the medieval spelling; American English writes the same word as "draft".
- Checkers is the North American name for the identical game, taken from the chequered board.