Meaning & use
queen
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Meanings
nouncountable
A woman who holds the highest royal rank in a country and rules it, or who is the wife of a king.
Grammar: Capitalized when used as a title before a name: Queen Victoria.
Patterns
- the queen of somewhere
- Queen + name
The queen waved to the crowd from the palace balcony.
Queen Elizabeth I ruled England for forty-four years.
The king and queen greeted the guests at the door.
nouncountablebiology
The one fertile female in a colony of bees, ants, or wasps, whose main job is laying eggs.
Grammar: Biology sense; each colony of honeybees normally has one queen.
Patterns
- queen bee
- queen ant
Worker bees feed and protect the queen inside the hive.
The queen ant can lay thousands of eggs a day.
nouncountable
The most powerful piece in chess, or a playing card showing a queen, ranking below the king.
Grammar: Games sense: a queen can move any number of squares in a straight line.
Patterns
- the queen of spades
- capture the queen
She lost her queen early in the game but still won.
He held the queen of hearts and played it last.
nouncountablefigurativeinformal
A woman or thing seen as the finest or most admired in a particular group or activity.
Grammar: Often followed by of: queen of the dance floor.
Patterns
- the queen of something
Everyone calls her the queen of pop for her chart success.
Our neighbor is the queen of home baking.
Word forms
| plural | queens |
|---|
Common combinations
- queen bee
- Remove the queen bee and the hive loses its leader.
- beauty queen
- She was crowned beauty queen of the county fair.
- queen mother
- The queen mother attended the opening of the hospital.
- queen of hearts
- She drew the queen of hearts from the deck.
- drama queen
- Stop being such a drama queen about a small scratch.
Synonyms and how they differ
- monarch
- Monarch is a gender-neutral word for a king or queen and sounds more formal than queen.
- empress
- An empress rules an empire or is the wife of an emperor, so it signals a larger realm than queen.
- sovereign
- Sovereign stresses supreme legal power, and works for any ruler regardless of gender.
Opposites
Word family
- queenly adjective
- like or suited to a queen
- queendom noun
- the realm or status of a queen
- queenhood noun
- the rank of a queen
- queenship noun
- the position or reign of a queen
Commonly confused: queen or queer?
queen vs queer
Queer looks and sounds somewhat similar but is a completely different word, so do not swap them.
Practice
In a beehive, the female that lays all the eggs is called the ___.
Choose one answer.
The queen is the single egg-laying female in the colony. Workers are non-laying females, drones are males, and empress is not used for bees.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “queen”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.