queen
The definition of a queen is a woman who rules a country or is married to a king.
(noun)An example of a queen was England’s Queen Elizabeth I.
A queen is defined as a girl who is very important or successful at something.
(noun)An example of a queen is someone successful at fashion, the queen of fashion.
The definition of a queen is card or playing piece in a board game.
(noun)- An example of a queen is a chess piece that is very powerful.
- An example of a queen is a card marked with Q.
Queen means a female insect capable of reproduction.
(noun)An example of a queen is the bee that is responsible for laying eggs.
Queen is slang for a homosexual man who has female characteristics.
(noun)An example of a queen is a man who has a very high voice and feminine mannerisms.
See queen in Webster's New World College Dictionary
noun
- the wife of a king
- a woman who rules over a monarchy in her own right; female sovereign
- a woman foremost or judged to be foremost among others in certain attributes or accomplishments, as beauty, etc.
- a place or thing regarded as the best or most beautiful of its kind
- the fully developed, reproductive female in a colony of bees, ants, or termites
- a playing card with a conventionalized picture of a queen on it
- Slang a male homosexual, specif. one with pronounced feminine characteristics: term of contempt or derision
- Chess the most powerful piece, permitted to move any number of unoccupied squares in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction
Origin: ME quen < OE cwen: see quean
transitive verb
- to make (a girl or woman) a queen
- Chess to make a queen of (a pawn that has reached the opponent's end of the board)
intransitive verb
See queen in American Heritage Dictionary 4
noun
- a. The wife or widow of a king.b. A woman sovereign.
- Something having eminence or supremacy in a given domain and personified as a woman: Paris is regarded as the queen of cities.
- 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.
- The fertile, fully developed female in a colony of social bees, ants, or termites.
- A mature female cat, especially one kept for breeding purposes.
- Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.
- To make (a woman) a queen.
- Games To raise (a pawn) to queen in chess.
Games
Origin:
Origin: Middle English quene
Origin: , from Old English cwēn; see gwen- in Indo-European roots
. Word History: Queen and quean sound alike, are spelled almost identically, and both refer to women, but of wildly different kinds. Queen comes from Old English cwēn, pronounced (kwān), “queen, wife of a king,” and comes from Germanic *kwēn-iz, “woman, wife, queen.” Quean comes from Old English cwene, pronounced (kwĕnˈə), “woman, female, female serf”; from the eleventh century on it was also used to mean “prostitute.” The Germanic source of cwene is *kwen-ōn-, “woman, wife.” Once established, the pejorative sense of quean drove out its neutral senses and especially in the 16th and 17th centuries it 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 except in some regions. • The Germanic root for both words, *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.”Learn more about queen
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