Short answers, pulled from the story.
A cheque is a document that orders a bank, building society, or credit union to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to a named payee. The drawer writes the amount, date, and payee, then signs it, instructing their bank, the drawee, to pay the stated sum. It is a negotiable instrument and a type of bill of exchange.
Most countries saw cheque volumes peak in the late 1980s or early 1990s, after which electronic methods became more popular. Usage has fallen since the 1990s as debit cards, credit cards, telephone banking, online banking, and mobile payments took over, and because paper cheques are costly for banks to process.
Forms of the cheque date back to ancient banking systems, including the adesha used in India during the Maurya Empire from 321 to 185 BC and the praescriptiones believed used by the ancient Romans in the 1st century BC. Persian banks issued letters of credit called cak from the third century AD, which became the sakk used by traders in the Abbasid Caliphate.
Check is the original English spelling, while cheque, from the French chequer, is believed to have come into use around 1828 when James William Gilbart made the switch in his Practical Treatise on Banking. Since the 19th century, cheque has become standard for the financial instrument in the Commonwealth and Ireland, while American English uses check for both meanings.
Cheques continue in the United Kingdom, France, and Ireland, partly because cheque payments are free for consumers, with France making more than 1 billion cheque payments in 2020. New Zealand phased out cheques completely in 2020, Poland withdrew them in 2006, and Australia plans to remove them by 2030.
A cheque has four main items: the drawer whose account is drawn, the payee who is to be paid, the drawee bank where the cheque is presented for payment, and the amount in a stated currency. The amount is customarily written in both words and figures, and machine-readable routing and account information appears at the bottom in MICR format.
Cheque fraud in the UK in 2020 totalled just £12.3 million across 185 million transactions, while online authorised payment scams reached £479 million across 4.1 billion online payments. This relative safety has driven a resurgence of cheques in some commercial transactions, where businesses use them to avoid phishing fraud.