Last week we explored the word wife, but it’s so closely linked to queen that I had to look into this word next!

Queen traces its roots back to the original Indo-European word gwen, which means…you guessed it…”woman.” Just like wife. In ancient Germanic languages, that’s how it was used. But by the time Old English began to evolve, we’d begun using it specifically for what one might call “THE wife”–the wife of the king. And by Middle English, quene (spelled like that rather than our current spelling) had become fully differentiated from “wife” and meant “the pre-eminent female noble; wife of a king; female ruling in her own right.”

I find it fascinating to realize that English, with queen, is one of the few languages whose word for the title is not just the female version of a our male word, king.

Word Nerds Merch!