Queen

How to spell queen

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce queen

What does queen mean?

1. nounA female sovereign or the wife of a king.
2. nounThe most powerful piece in chess, able to move any number of squares in a straight line or diagonally.
3. nounA playing card ranking between the jack and the king, bearing the figure of a royal woman.
4. nounThe single fertile female in a colony of bees, ants, or other social insects.

Queen in a sentence

• The queen opened the new session of parliament with a formal speech.

• He lost the game after carelessly trading his queen for a knight.

• She drew the queen of hearts to complete a winning hand.

• The beekeeper marked the queen with a dab of paint to track her easily.

• Crowds lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the queen in her carriage.

• Advancing a pawn to the back rank let her promote it to a second queen.

Where does queen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from the Old English cwēn, which originally meant simply 'woman' or 'wife' before it narrowed to mean the wife of a king or a female ruler in her own right. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form gwēniz and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root that meant 'woman', the same ancient root that gave Greek its word gunē 'woman', which survives in English borrowings like 'gynaecology'. The everyday English word 'quean', now archaic, came from a closely related Old English variant and once meant a lowborn or disreputable woman, so the two words split into very different reputations. The 'qu' spelling reflects the old 'cw' sound that Norman scribes re-spelled with 'qu' after 1066, while the 'ee' simply marks the long vowel. Because the word is so old and native, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years.

How the word is built

• queen (from Old English cwēn: woman, wife, female ruler); a single unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix