Etymologically
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queen

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Pronunciation

  • IPA: /kwiːn/[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English quene,[2][3] inherited from Old English cwēn (“queen, female ruler; woman; wife”),[4][2] from Proto-Germanic *kwoeniz,[4][2] an ablaut variant of *kwenōn, the source of quean,[4][5] from Proto-Indo-European *gwen- (“woman”).[4] It is cognate with Old Saxon quān “wife”, Old Norse kvæn and Gothic qēns,[4][2][5] and outside Germanic with Old Irish ben “woman”, Greek gunḗ, Armenian kin and Sanskrit jáni “wife”.[3][2]

Earliest recorded meaning

The wife of a king: before 725 in Barnhart.[2] The OED's first examples, a king's consort and a woman ruling a state in her own right, are from about 825–893.[6]

Semantic evolution

The most ancient Germanic sense seems to have been “wife”, which had specialized by Old English times to “wife of a king”;[4][7] in Old Norse the word still mostly meant a wife.[4] English is one of the few Indo-European languages whose word for queen is not a feminine derivative of the word for king.[4] Anything personified as chief and female is a queen from late Old English,[4] and a woman pre-eminent in some sphere by the 1590s.[4] The chess piece is so called from about 1400,[4] and the playing card and the fertile female of bees and ants are also queens.[8][9] Queen mother is by the 1570s.[4] The slang sense, an obviously homosexual man, is recorded from 1924.[10] Old English cwene “woman” became the archaic quean, “a bold or impudent woman”, also used for a prostitute in the 16th and 17th centuries;[7][11] when the two words came to sound alike, the derogatory one fell out of use as too confusing.[7]

Timeline

  • before 725 – a king's wife.[2]
  • c. 825 – a female sovereign.[6]
  • late Old English – something personified as chief.[4]
  • c. 1400 – the chess piece.[4]
  • 1570s – queen mother.[4]
  • 1590s – a pre-eminent woman.[4]
  • 1611 – verb, queen it.[6][3]
  • 1924 – a homosexual man (slang).[10]

Modern meaning

Noun

  1. A woman who rules a country in her own right; a female sovereign.
  2. The wife or widow of a king.
  3. A woman or thing pre-eminent in some field: the queen of crime fiction.
  4. The most powerful piece in chess; a playing card bearing a queen's picture.
  5. The fertile female of bees, ants or termites.
  6. (slang, often offensive) A homosexual man, especially an effeminate one.

Verb

  1. To make a woman queen; in chess, to promote a pawn to a queen.
  2. queen it: To behave like a queen; to act haughtily.

Word family

  • queenless
  • queenlike
  • quean
  • gynecology
  • banshee
  • zenana
  • queenly

References

  1. ^ Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  3. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  5. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  6. ^ a b c Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  7. ^ a b c Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  8. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), 3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
  9. ^ Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003), 11th ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  10. ^ a b Dalzell, Tom; Victor, Terry, eds. (2013), The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2nd ed., London: Routledge
  11. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin