Queens

How to spell queens

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce queens

What does queens mean?

1. nounMore than one queen: female sovereigns, the wives of kings, or the most powerful pieces in chess.

Queens in a sentence

• The museum exhibit traced the reigns of several medieval queens.

• Both queens sat at the head of the long banquet table.

Where does queens come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of queen, which descends from the Old English cwen, a word that simply meant 'woman' or 'wife' and could also denote a wife of high rank. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root gwen-, and that same ancient root for 'woman' survives in the Greek-derived word gynaecology and in the now archaic English word quean, meaning a bold or disreputable woman. Over the early medieval period cwen narrowed and rose in status to mean specifically the wife of a king or a female sovereign in her own right. The spelling settled with the qu- and the -ee- vowel during the Middle English period, and the plural simply adds -s. The handy spelling trap is that the homophone-adjacent quean is a different and obsolete word, so queens always keeps its royal -ee- spelling.

How the word is built

• queen (from Old English cwen: woman, wife)
• -s (plural)