Kinged

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Made someone into a king by formally granting royal status
2. Elevated a person to the position of monarch through official ceremony
3. Installed as a sovereign ruler with the title and powers of a king

Etymology: The past tense of "king" is "kinged," and the verb itself is simply the noun "king" put to work: to king someone is to make them one. Its interest lies in the root beneath it. "King" descends from a Germanic word meaning something like "of the clan," built from "kin" plus a suffix, so the word for ruler originally named a person of noble family rather than a title of absolute power. Old English "cyning" and its relatives had the same basic shape across the Germanic languages, from German "König" to Swedish "kung." The same root also reaches surprisingly far afield. Slavic words such as Russian "князь" (knjaz') and Polish "ksiądz" (priest, prince) are related to it, and their meanings wander between prince and priest. The shared root reflects the old idea of the leader as someone from a particular lineage, a notion that held the various meanings together long before any coronation ceremony was involved.