WEIRD FACTS ABOUT
CHEQUE
The 350th anniversary of bankers' cheques was celebrated on 16 February 2009. Actually, it's not the 350th anniversary at all, but the 349th. The date on the cheque is '16th of February 1659', but before 1752, the year began on March 25, so it was what we would now call 1660. It was a cheque for £400 to Mr Delboe, drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, 'scriveners and bankers'. But it wasn't then called a 'cheque'. That word did not come into use until a 1706 Act of Parliament and even then, 'cheque' or 'checque' as it was spelt, meant the counterfoil, not the money order.
Payment by cheque in the UK peaked in 1990 when 11 million were issued every day. If all those cheques were laid end-to-end, they would stretch 12 times around the world.
According to the billion-word Oxford English Corpus, the adjective most likely to immediately precede the word 'cheque' is 'blank'.
Related links:
COMPUTATION
Notches on animal bones show that people have been making computations since around 30,000BC. A... MORE
MOST POPULAR
adolescence alcohol attractiveness bestiality bush bush senior costa rica dingo fart jamaica liechtenstein moustache penguin peter the great tuesday
