Queene

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A female monarch who reigns over a kingdom or territory
2. a woman who holds a position of authority or influence within a specific domain
3. a highly respected or admired woman, often associated with grace and nobility

Etymology: The spelling "queene" is simply an older form of "queen," kept alive in print long after the rest of English had settled on the shorter version. The word it spells has a surprising starting point: the Old English "cwēn" did not mean royalty at all. It meant "woman" or "wife," a sense it shares with its relatives across the Germanic languages, where Dutch "kween" still denotes a woman past childbearing age and Icelandic "kvon" means wife. Those roots trace back to a Proto-Indo-European word for "woman," so the modern queen is, at bottom, a woman of the household. Royal rank came later, as the word narrowed from ordinary womanhood to the consort or ruler of a kingdom. Meanwhile the Latin "regina" was imported to name royalty directly, but it never fully displaced the native word, which in Middle English had largely eclipsed it. The word also shares a root with "quean," originally a woman or female servant, which later drifted toward a disreputable sense, a reminder of how far the same stem could travel in English.

Synonyms: queen, monarch, sovereign, ruler, empress

Antonyms: king, commoner, subject