American Heritage Dictionary Entry: queen HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key. Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window. guide to the dictionary THE USAGE PANEL The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions. The Panelists NEED HELP SOLVING A CROSSWORD PUZZLE? Go to our Crossword Puzzle Solver and type in the letters that you know, and the Solver will produce a list of possible solutions. -- AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY APP The new American Heritage Dictionary app is now available for iOS and Android. THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY BLOG The articles in our blog examine new words, revised definitions, interesting images from the fifth edition, discussions of usage, and more. OPEN DICTIONARY PROJECT Share your ideas for new words and new meanings of old words! Start Sharing Now! -- See word lists from the best-selling 100 Words Series! Find out more! INTERESTED IN DICTIONARIES? Check out the Dictionary Society of North America at http://www.dictionarysociety.com queen (kwēn) Share: Tweet n. 1. a. The wife or widow of a king. b. A female sovereign. 2. a. A woman considered preeminent in a particular field: the reigning queen of hip-hop. b. A woman chosen as the winner of a contest or the honorary head of an event: a beauty queen; the queen of the prom. 3. Something having eminence or supremacy in a given domain and personified as a woman: Paris is regarded as the queen of cities. 4. Abbr. Q Games a. The most powerful chess piece, able to move in any direction over any number of empty squares in a straight line. b. A playing card bearing the figure of a queen, ranking above the jack and below the king. 5. a. The sole reproductive female, or one of several such females, in a colony of eusocial insects, such as bees, wasps, ants, or termites. b. The reproductive female in a colony of naked mole rats. 6. A mature female cat, especially one kept for breeding purposes. 7. Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a gay man. 8. A queen-size bed. v. queened, queen·ing, queens v.tr. 1. To make (a woman) a queen. 2. Games To raise (a pawn) to queen in chess. v.intr. Games To become a queen in chess. adj. Of or relating to a queen-size bed: queen sheets; a queen bed skirt.Idiom: queen it To act like a queen; domineer: queens it over the whole family. [Middle English quene, from Old English cwēn; see gwen- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] Word History: On paper, a queen and a quean are easily distinguished. In speech, however, it is easy to imagine how the complete homophony of the two words, both referring to female persons, could lead to embarrassing double-entendres—a fact which has probably contributed to a decline in use of the word quean in modern times. How did this troubling homophony come about? Queen comes from Old English cwēn, pronounced (kwān) and meaning "queen, wife of a king." The Old English word descends from Germanic *kwēn-iz, "woman, wife, queen," a derivative of the Germanic root *kwen-, "woman." Modern English quean, on the other hand, descends from another Old English word, cwene, pronounced (kwĕnə) and meaning "woman, female, female serf." The Germanic source of cwene is *kwen-ōn-, "woman, wife." This Germanic word is a derivative of the same root *kwen-, "woman, wife," that is the source of Modern English queen. From the eleventh century onward, qwen, the Middle English descendant of Old English cwene, "woman, female serf," and ancestor of Modern English quean, was also used to mean "prostitute." Once established, this pejorative sense of quean drove out its neutral senses, and especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, the word was used almost solely to refer to prostitutes. Around the same time, in many English dialects the pronunciation of queen and quean became identical, leading to the obsolescence of the latter term outside of a few regions. The Germanic root *kwen-, "woman," comes by Grimm's Law from the Indo-European root *gwen-, "woman," which appears in at least two other English words borrowed from elsewhere in the Indo-European family. One is gynecology, from Greek gunē, "woman." Another, less obvious, one is banshee, "woman of the fairies," the wailing female spirit attendant on a death, from Old Irish ben, "woman." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices: Indo-European Roots Semitic Roots The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 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