Diagonals names

Is there a convention for which way diagonals should be named, or is this one of those things where people do it however they like (with a few people, of course, convinced that their way is the only proper way  )?

I tend to list the lower letter first.

Is it the c1-h6 diagonal, or the h6-c1 diagonal?

d8-h4 diagonal, or the h4-d8 diagonal?

--Cystem

conventionally I've seen it written as c1-h6 or a1-h8 though there isn't a standard as far as I've seen, just that almost all analysis is written from the white side of the board, even if black is the one being analyzed.

Can we derive any benefit from labeling these diagonals?  Why not also the paths of the rooks and knights?  The queen names would look horrendous all on one board.

I would rather remember openings for diagonals like King's Indian or Catalan for example.  Instead of "adw", Ruy Lopez.  If it gets moved over to "abw" then it is a variation, Caro and later Archangelsk. 

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/which-diagonals-have-names

People familiar with that old post of mine may have noticed I've been using those diagonal names ever since, in quotes, in annotated games I post. I ignored all those immature tiny men trying to make trouble, if you get my meaning.

One insight I believe is important is that just as there are differences between ranks and files, there are also differences between diagonals pointing in one direction and diagonals pointing in the other direction. I call diagonals pointing toward the upper right "hills" and diagonals pointing toward the upper left "dales", but I haven't been using those terms here because even my quoted names are unfamiliar: I don't want to get so far afield from what people know that I'm essentially speaking a foreign language!

Thanks Estragon.

I live in a city where the original plan for naming North/South streets was to name them after cities in the U.S.A.; cities west of the Mississippi River for streets west of Main street, and cities east of the Mississippi River for streets east of Main street. But, at some point, they started naming any new streets using numbers only.  No wonder tourists get lost.  I have visited towns where some of the streets were named after Presidents of the U.S.A.

Maybe we could name each diagonal after a GrandMaster?

I'd completely forgotten about starting this thread 5 years ago. Funny, I hadn't even thought of people trying to push pet word names they'd invented for various diagonals. My original question was to try to determine if there was an established particular order preferred for the end-square coordinates so a specified diagonal would be most widely recognizable right away to the greatest number of people, and I just assumed the postulated names would incorporate the a-h and 1-8 coordinates already known to people. There are some novel schemes proposed here, but I think some of them would require accompanying explanatory tables for most people to know what was going on.

Yes, I understood partly what you were trying to ask, which was about *notation*, but your thread title said "names," then people started talking about *names*, so I thought I'd chime in.

As far as diagonal name notation used in books, yes, using pairs of coordinates separated with a single hypen is standard, like f1-h3. Sometimes authors will do that even with descriptive notation, like K1-KR4...

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(p. 103)

But pushing the f-pawn early can have
the drawback of exposing your king to pesky queen
checks along the weakened K1-KR4 diagonal.

Pandolfini, Bruce. 1995. The Chess Doctor. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Which of the pair comes first is less clear. In a quick survey of books I quoted, the most common usage was with the lower rank number coming first, such as h1-a8...

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(p. 119)

With 1. e4, White opens up the Queen on the d1-h5 diagonal and lib-
erates the King Bishop to go to c4, where it can attack f7 and, potentially,
the Black King.

Alburt, Lev, and Larry Parr. 1997. Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters, Volume 2: Beyond the Basics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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...which is the convention I adopted, but I found some authors favored the opposite order when they were thinking of the direction of piece motion...

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(p. 103)

4. If castled kingside, will moving the f-pawn expose
you to checks along your QR7-KN1 diagonal?

Pandolfini, Bruce. 1995. The Chess Doctor. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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...or when trying to keep the file letter the same in order to avoid confusion when flipping the board...

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(p. 86)
Dangerous Diagonal   Either of the two diagonals on which the
FOOL'S MATE can occur. White can be so mated along the e1-h4 diagonal,
Black along the e8-h5 diagonal.

Pandolfini, Bruce. 1995. Chess Thinking. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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So as far as I can tell, statistically the convention seems to be to use the lower rank number first (e.g., 1 before 8), then the pair of row-files separated by a hyphen. I did not do a very extensive empirical search, though, nor did I find any mention anywhere of chess notation conventions. One thing that is great that I noticed, though, is that there does seem to be a convention of using a hyphen between the notation and the descriptive text, like "a-pawn," "h-file," "h7-square," regardless of which concept word is being used. (In my own research, not published, I came up with a 2-symbol diagonal notation so that I can write things like "D5-dale" that is consistent with existing notation conventions, but that's yet another step farther afield...)

By the way, I'm not trying to push "pet" names: I just needed some system right away that worked well since I frequently want to describe diagonals by name when describing strategy, and since mostly I got a lot of tiny men not taking me seriously when I posted, I was compelled to adopt some workable system in a hurry that avoided notation that took too many seconds for a reader to understand in a hurry.

Thanks for all the info. Alas, I'm no better versed in chess literature now than I was 5 years ago , so your summaries are helpful. The apparent preference for ordering by rank number rather than by file letter is the reverse of what I was expecting, but my "expectation" wasn't based on any actual knowledge.

When I mentioned pet names I was thinking more about references to some diagonals based on related openings or maybe maneuvers, which is not helpful to novices who might not be familiar with an opening or maneuver. And of course there's plenty of need to refer to diagonals when discussing positions and strategy at all stages of games, not just during the opening moves, so tossing out something like the "Ruy Lopez diagonal" just doesn't seem quite fitting to me in an analysis of an endgame position.

Hey, I just found an online reference to standard diagonal notation:

http://www.mark-weeks.com/aboutcom/ble21brd.htm

"The diagonals are often referred to by their starting and ending squares, from left to right. The 'a1 to h8' and 'a8 to h1' diagonals are the longest on the board, eight squares each."

I don't know if that author is authoritative, but his left-to-right "rule" is reflected in this document, as well...

www.okschess.org/starting/promotion/notation.doc

...and *all* quotes I posted above follow that left-to-right convention, I noticed, therefore I'll be using that convention of left-to-right instead of by increasing rank number, since that is the strongest evidence I've seen so far of a convention.

I also found the same question asked on this site in yet another post, four years ago...

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/diagonal-notation

If that many people are asking the same question, it must be an important topic.

Interesting subject. Naming diagonals (beyond current conventions, e.g., long diagonal, a1-h8 diagonal) is probably useful only personally, as for mnemonics. For example, I refer to the long white diagonal as the Longbow. This connotes the English longbow that predominated as a weapon of choice prior to the development of gunpowder. But it also appeals to my chess imagination. The name was reinforced for me when I learned the name of an American attack helicopter, the Boeing AH-64 Apache Longbow. Both the AH and the 64 seemed especially apt. As for the other long diagonal, I call it the Dragonboat. But that's another story.

I refer to them alphabetically (a-h) (or left to right from the white side of the board, if you prefer) for the sake of consistency. This has the added benefit of telling you the slope of the diagonal. If the digit in the starting square is less than the digit in the ending square, the diagonal slopes "upward" from left to right (e.g., a1-h8) from the white side of the board. If the digit in the starting square is greater than the digit in the ending square, the diagonal slopes "downward" from left to right (e.g., a8-h1). I don't know if this is standard. It's just my personal system and it makes sense to me.