Other forms: queens
A queen is the woman at the top — either she rules the country herself, or she is married to the king. The face on the coin, the crown, the wave from the balcony, the flag that goes up when she is at home.
Queen is the strongest piece on a chess board, moving as far as it likes in any direction, and it is the card between the jack and the king. It is the one egg-laying female in a hive of bees or a nest of ants, which is where queen bee comes from, said about a woman who runs a place and makes sure everybody knows it. It goes in front of a name as a title: Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth. And it heads a small family of phrases for people who take on a role — a drama queen turns a delayed train into a tragedy, a beauty queen has won a contest, and a drag queen performs in exaggerated women's dress.
1nounqueenA woman who rules a country, or the wife of a king.~94%
“The queen opened parliament in November.”
2nounpieceThe strongest piece on a chess board.~2%
“He lost his queen on the twelfth move.”
3nounsingleThe single egg-laying female in a colony of bees or ants.~2%
“The whole hive follows the queen.”
4nounplayingThe playing card that ranks between the jack and the king.~2%
“She turned over the queen of hearts.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 144 sentences found in the wild and placed 108 of them on a sense (36 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Queen goes back to Old English cwēn, and behind that to Proto-Germanic *kwēniz — wife, woman. Further back still is a Proto-Indo-European root, *gʷḗn, that meant woman and nothing grander. Swedish kvinna and Danish kvinde are the same word and still mean exactly that. English is where it climbed: the ordinary word for a woman ended up on a throne.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʷḗn — woman
Proto-Germanic
*kwēniz — wife, woman
Proto-West Germanic
*kwāni
Old English
cwēn — queen
Middle English
quene
English, today
queen
From Middle English quene, queen, cwen, from Old English cwēn (“queen”), from Proto-West Germanic kwāni, from Proto-Germanic kwēniz (“wife, woman”), from Proto-Indo-European gʷḗn (“woman”). Cognate with Scots queen, wheen (“queen”), Old Saxon quān "wife"; > Middle Low German - quene (“elderly woman”), Dutch kween (“woman past child-bearing age”), Swedish kvinna (“woman”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kvinne (“woman”), Danish kvinde (“woman”), Icelandic kvon (“wife”), Gothic 𐌵𐌴𐌽𐍃 (“wife”), Norwegian - dialectal kvån (“wife”). Related to and possibly merged with and/or absorbed some senses of quean, from Middle English quene, from Old English cwene (“woman; female serf, quean”), see quean. Generally eclipsed non-native Middle English regina (“queen”), borrowed from Latin rēgīna (“queen”) (see Modern English Regina). a doublet of quean and gyne. In reference to insects, by analogy with the obsolete term king, which it took over from starting in the 1600s, when they were discovered to be female.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA