Other forms: crowned, crowns, crowning
A crown is the gold hat a king or queen wears: a ring of metal with points, set with stones, heavier than it looks. At a coronation it is lifted off a cushion and lowered onto a head.
It is a verb as well — you crown a monarch, and a boxer is crowned champion. Written with a capital C, the Crown means the monarchy as an institution rather than the person: Crown land, Crown court, the Crown prosecutes. Your body has one too, the crown of your head, the very top where the hair spins round, and a dentist's crown is the cap fitted over a broken tooth. A tree has a crown: the spread of branches up top. To crown it all means on top of everything else, and what follows is the worst part.
1nouncrownA circular gold headdress worn by a king or queen.~2%
“The crown was too heavy to wear for more than an hour.”
2nounmonarchyThe monarchy as an institution, rather than the person who holds it.~67%
“The land belongs to the Crown, not to the family.”
3nountopThe top of the head, or the top of a tree or hill.~27%
“He had a bald patch at the crown and a full head of hair everywhere else.”
4nounartificialAn artificial cap fitted over a damaged tooth.~2%
“The dentist fitted a crown on the broken molar.”
5verbplaceTo place a crown on someone and make them king or queen.~2%
“She was crowned at nineteen and reigned for fifty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
crown is a headdress.
Crown came through Middle English coroune and Anglo-Norman corone from Latin corōna, a crown or a wreath, itself from Ancient Greek κορώνη. The Roman corōna was as much a circle of leaves as a band of gold — something put on the head of a winner. The same word spread across Europe as the coin called a krona in Sweden and a krone in Denmark, and it names the corona of the sun, the ring of light around the edge.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ker- (turn)
Ancient Greek
κορώνη
Latin
corōna — crown, wreath
Anglo-Norman
corone
Middle English
coroune
English, today
crown
Middle English coroune, from Anglo-Norman corone, from Latin corōna (“crown, wreath”), from Ancient Greek κορώνη. a doublet of corona and korona and koruna and krona and króna and krone. corenbēag and kinehelm, kynehelm, from cynehelm. The paper sizes (paper size) are so called because the papers were originally watermarked with a crown.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA