Kyng

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic spelling of king, referring to a male sovereign who rules a kingdom by hereditary right
2. An old form of the word king, meaning a crowned male monarch who governs a realm
3. A obsolete variant of king, used for a hereditary male ruler at the head of a monarchy

Etymology: The modern spelling "king" is just the older "kyng" with its spelling settled, and the word's roots run back to a notion of family rather than power. The Proto-Germanic form "kuningaz" was built from "kunją", meaning clan, family or kin, which itself descends from an Indo-European root meaning to beget or produce. The suffix "-ing" marks a person connected to something, so a "kuning" was originally someone of a particular lineage, a man of good family, before the word narrowed to the one who ruled. Old English had several forms of the word, including "cyning" and "cening", and it sat alongside the related "cyne", meaning royal or of the kin. The Old English form "cyning" is a doublet of the Slavic "knez", which is why languages as distant as Russian and Polish have words for prince or priest that look close to it. Those Slavic words came out of the same ancient family-based sense. Among its many cognates are German "König", Dutch "koning" and Swedish "konung", which all show the same underlying pattern of kinship turned into rank.