Queanish

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Having the bold, saucy, or disreputable manner traditionally associated with a quean, an ill-behaved or loose-living woman
2. Characteristic of a quean, meaning behaving in a brazen, shameless, or immoral way that was once attributed to women
3. Displaying the coarse, impudent, or morally loose conduct of a quean, a term once used for a disorderly or unchaste woman

Etymology: "Queanish" is built from two parts: "quean," an old English word for a woman, which over time came to mean a disreputable or immoral one, and the suffix "-ish," meaning "having the qualities of." Put together, the adjective describes conduct that is brazen in the manner of such a woman. The word is also a doublet of "queenish," meaning the two forms split from the same source and went their separate ways. "Quean" and "queen" descend from a common root, and the spelling and sense of "quean" diverged as it took on its disparaging meaning while "queen" kept its royal one.