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 Unite!
Read More Word of the Week Posts
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
