Kingdom

How to spell kingdom

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kingdom

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kingdom mean?

1. nounA country or territory ruled by a king or queen.
2. nounOne of the major divisions into which living things are classified, such as the animal or plant grouping.

Kingdom in a sentence

• The ancient kingdom stretched from the river to the sea.

• The textbook explained how mushrooms belong to the fungal kingdom rather than the plant one.

• The young prince would one day inherit the whole kingdom.

• Every species studied in the lab sits within the animal kingdom.

Where does kingdom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English cyningdom, which combined cyning, meaning 'king', with the suffix -dom. That suffix, related to the modern word 'doom' and to the verb 'deem', originally carried the sense of 'judgement', 'authority', or 'condition', so a cyningdom was literally the state or authority belonging to a king. The same -dom survives in words like 'freedom', 'wisdom', and 'boredom', where it still marks a condition or domain. Over the centuries the spelling smoothed from cyningdom to the modern kingdom, but the structure stayed transparent: take 'king' and add '-dom'. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists borrowed the word to label the great divisions of living things, giving us the animal and plant kingdoms.

How the word is built

• king (royal ruler)
• -dom (state, rank, or domain)