Empress

How to spell empress

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce empress

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does empress mean?

1. nounA woman who rules an empire in her own right, or the wife of an emperor.

Empress in a sentence

• The empress ruled the vast territory for nearly forty years.

• The museum displays a crown once worn by the empress.

Where does empress come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Empress traces back to the Latin imperator, meaning 'commander' or 'one who holds supreme power', which itself grew from imperare, 'to command'. The feminine counterpart in Latin was imperatrix, but English actually took its word through Old French, where imperatrix had softened into emperesse. When the term arrived in English in the 1100s and 1200s, the masculine 'emperor' and the feminine 'empress' came as a matched pair, both reshaped by French pronunciation. The unstressed middle of the word is where the spelling trap lives: the 'e' that once stood in 'emperor' has collapsed into a faint sound, so writers must remember the single 'm' followed by 'pr' and the doubled 's' of the -ess ending. The same imperator root still powers 'imperial' and 'imperative', which is a useful reminder that an empress is literally a female commander.

How the word is built

• emper- (from Latin imperator: commander, ruler)
• -ess (feminine suffix)