king

• kyng, kynge (archaic)
• kinge (obsolete)

• enPR: kĭng, IPA^(key): /kʰɪŋ/

  • Audio (UK)

    (file)

• (US, pre-/ŋ/ tensing), IPA^(key): /kiŋ/

  • Audio (US)

    (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪŋ, -iŋ

From Middle English king, kyng, from Old English cyng, cyning (“king”), from Proto-West Germanic *kuning, from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz, *kunungaz (“king”), equivalent to kin +‎ -ing. Doublet of cyning and knez.

Cognate with Scots keeng (“king”), North Frisian köning (“king”), West Frisian kening (“king”), Dutch koning (“king”), Low German Koning, Köning (“king”), German König (“king”), Danish konge (“king”), Norwegian konge, Swedish konung, kung (“king”), Icelandic konungur, kóngur (“king”), Polish ksiądz (“priest”), Russian князь (knjazʹ, “prince”), Old Church Slavonic кънѧѕь (kŭnędzĭ), Romanian chinez, Finnish kuningas (“king”), Estonian kuningas, Ingrian kunigas, Karelian kuninkas, Livvi kuńingas, Ludian kuńingas, Veps kuningaz, Võro kuning and Votic kunikaz. Eclipsed non-native Middle English roy (“king”) (Early Modern English roy), borrowed from Old French roi, rei, rai (“king”).

king (plural kings)

1. A male monarch; a man who heads a monarchy; in an absolute monarchy, the supreme ruler of his nation.

   Henry VIII was the king of England from 1509 to 1547.

2. The monarch with the most power and authority in a monarchy, regardless of sex.
   • 1891 January 3, ““King” Wilhelmina”, in The Chicago Daily Tribune, volume LI, number III, Chicago, Ill., page 5, column 7:

     The British Parliament has had made it for it in the past the claim that it could do anything excepting convert a woman into a man. […] And the high court [of Amsterdam] has done it by deciding that all officials and public servants shall take their oath of allegiance not to Queen Wilhelmina but to King Wilhelmina.

   • 2009, Charlotte Booth, “Hatshepsut”, in The Curse of the Mummy and Other Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, Oneworld Publications, →ISBN, page 93:

     Hatshepsut was ruling as a king, not queen and she needed to be recognised as such.

   • 2011, Nwando Achebe, “Mgbapu Ahebi: Exile in Igalaland, ca. 1895–1916”, in The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, Bloomington, Ind., Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, pages 63–64:

     The act of perforating one’s ears could be read as a gendering performance—a modification from an overt masculinity (king) to a tempered female masculinity (king with female traits)—in which the male king was expected to adopt the quintessence of Omeppa’s female king wife, Ebulejonu, and by so doing, embody the true essence of womanhood. […] Attah-Ebulejonu, like Hatshepsut of Egypt before her, ruled as (and was remembered as) a king, not queen, perhaps setting the precedent for the coronation of another female king, Ahebi Ugbabe, about four centuries later. […] This time, the female king would not rule in the Igala kingdom nor would she be of Igala origin. Instead, the king would be an Igbo woman who had lived in Igalaland for many years, who had come of age and matured there and in the process had imbibed the cultural values and mores of the people with whom she had lived in exile.

3. A powerful or majorly influential person.

   Howard Stern styled himself as the "king of all media".

   • 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter I, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:

     "I wish we were back in Tenth Street. But so many children came […] and the Tenth Street house wasn't half big enough; and a dreadful speculative builder built this house and persuaded Austin to buy it. Oh, dear, and here we are among the rich and great; and the steel kings and copper kings and oil kings and their heirs and dauphins. […]"

   • 2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892:

     The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.

4. (countable or uncountable) Something that has a preeminent position.

   In times of financial panic, cash is king.

   • 2012 June 3, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “Mr. Plow” (season 4, episode 9; originally aired 11/19/1992)”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name):

     It would be difficult, for example, to imagine a bigger, more obvious subject for comedy than the laughable self-delusion of washed-up celebrities, especially if the washed-up celebrity in question is Adam West, a camp icon who can go toe to toe with William Shatner as the king of winking self-parody.

5. A component of certain games.
   1. (chess) The principal chess piece, that players seek to threaten with unavoidable capture to result in a victory by checkmate. It is often the tallest piece, with a symbolic crown with a cross at the top.
   2. (card games) A playing card with the letter "K" and the image of a king on it, the thirteenth card in a given suit.

      Hypernym: court card

   3. A checker (a piece of checkers/draughts) that reached the farthest row forward, thus becoming crowned (either by turning it upside-down, or by stacking another checker on it) and gaining more freedom of movement.
   4. The central pin or skittle in bowling games.
      • 1878, John Henry Walsh, British Rural Sports, page 712:

        In knockemdowns and bowls ten pins are used, the centre one being called the king, and the ball has to be grounded before it reaches the frame.

6. (UK, slang) A king skin.

   Oi mate, have you got kings?

7. A male dragonfly; a drake.
8. A king-sized bed.
   • 2002, Scott W. Donkin, Gerard Meyer, Peak Performance: Body and Mind, page 119:

     Try asking for a king-size bed next time because kings are usually firmer.

9. (graph theory) A vertex in a directed graph which can reach every other vertex via a path with a length of at most 2.

• Rex (the reigning king, formal), roy (obsolete, formal)

• (monarch): caesar, emperor, empress, kaiser, maharajah, prince, princess, queen, regent, royalty, shah, tsar, viceroy
• (playing card): ace, jack, joker, queen

• ♔, ♚

Chess pieces in English · chess pieces, chessmen (see also: chess) (layout · text)
king	queen	rook, castle	bishop	knight	pawn

Playing cards in English · playing cards (layout · text)
ace	deuce, two	three	four	five	six	seven
eight	nine	ten	jack, knave	queen	king	joker

Suits in English · suits (see also: cards, playing cards) (layout · text)
hearts	diamonds	spades	clubs

king (third-person singular simple present kings, present participle kinging, simple past and past participle kinged)

1. To crown king, to make (a person) king.
   • 1982, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, South Atlantic Review, Volume 47, page 16,

     The kinging of Macbeth is the business of the first part of the play […] .

   • 2008, William Shakespeare, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, Macbeth, Introduction, page 24:

     One narrative is the kinging and unkinging of Macbeth; the other narrative is the attack on Banquo's line and that line's eventual accession and supposed Jacobean survival through Malcolm's successful counter-attack on Macbeth.

2. To rule over as king.
   • 1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iv]:

     And let us do it with no show of fear; / No, with no more than if we heard that England / Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance; / For, my good liege, she is so idly king’d, / Her sceptre so fantastically borne / By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth, / That fear attends her not.

3. To perform the duties of a king.
   • 1918, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, The Railroad Trainman, Volume 35, page 675,

     He had to do all his kinging after supper, which left him no time for roystering with the nobility and certain others.

   • 2001, Chip R. Bell, Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning, page 6:

     Second, Mentor (the old man) combined the wisdom of experience with the sensitivity of a fawn in his attempts to convey kinging skills to young Telemachus.

4. To assume or pretend preeminence (over); to lord it over.
   • 1917, Edna Ferber, Fanny Herself, page 32:

     The seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de Gotha of Congregation Emanu-el. Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among the Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an immigrant youth, and who now owned hundreds of rich farm acres, besides houses, mills and banks, kinged it from the front seat of the center section.

5. To promote a piece of draughts/checkers that has traversed the board to the opposite side, that piece subsequently being permitted to move backwards as well as forwards.
   • 1957, Bertram Vivian Bowden, editor, Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, page 302:

     If the machine does this, it will lose only one point, and as it is not looking far enough ahead, it cannot see that it has not prevented its opponent from kinging but only postponed the evil day.

   • 1986, Rick DeMarinis, The Burning Women of Far Cry, page 100:

     I was about to make a move that would corner a piece that she was trying to get kinged, but I slid my checker back […] .

6. To dress and perform as a drag king.
   • 2008, Audrey Yue, “King Victoria: Asian Drag Kings, Postcolonial Female Masculinity, and Hybrid Sexuality in Australia”, in Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Audrey Yue, Mark McLelland, editors, AsiaPacifQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, page 266:

     Through the ex-centric diaspora, kinging in postcolonial Australia has become a site of critical hybridity where diasporic female masculinities have emerged through the contestations of "home" and "host" cultures.

king (plural kings)

1. Alternative form of qing (“Chinese musical instrument”)

• gink

From Proto-Finnic *kenkä. Cognate with Finnish kenkä.

• IPA^(key): /ˈkinɡ̊/, [ˈkiŋɡ̊]

king (genitive kinga, partitive kinga)

1. shoe

• keng
• qng̃, qng, queng, quing (Spanish variant)

• IPA^(key): /kɪŋ/, [kɪŋ]

king

1. indirect object marker: of, to, at, on, in, into, onto, among, around, for

king m

1. inflection of kione:
   1. genitive singular
   2. nominative plural

• kenin, kening, kinig (in compounds, toponymic)
• gug, kug (in compounds, influenced by Old Norse (see etymology))
• knyng (transmission error)
• chinge, chinȝ, cing, cining, cinȝ, ging, keing, keng, kingk, kingue, kining, kink, kyng, kynge

Inherited from the Old English cyning, from Proto-West Germanic *kuning, from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz. The forms kug (attested in the compounds kugdom, kuglond, and kugriche) and gug (attested in the compound guglond) show the influence of the Old Norse konungr, whence they borrow their root vowel. The early forms featuring syncope (chinge, chinȝ, cing, and cinȝ) may have long ī.

• IPA^(key): /kinɡ/, [kiŋɡ]

king (nominative plural kinges, also the early forms kingas or kingæs)

1. king (monarch)
2. king (chess piece)

• English: king (see there for further descendants)
• Scots: keeng, king
• Yola: kinge, king

• “king, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

Borrowed from English king.

king

1. (slang) great, awesome

   Synonym: kunglig

   Deras sound är king asså

   Their sound is so awesome

   Helgen var king

   The weekend was awesome

   – Jag lyckades fixa datorn. – King!

   – I managed to fix the computer. – Awesome!

2. (games) Synonym of ruta (“foursquare”).

Uninflected.

• Slangopedia

From English king.

king

1. king

king

1. Alternative form of kinge
   • 1867, “THE WEDDEEN O BALLYMORE”, in SONGS, ETC. IN THE DIALECT OF FORTH AND BARGY, number 5, page 96:

     Earch myde was a queen, an earch bye was a king;

     Each maid was a queen, and each boy was a king;

• Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828) William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published 1867, page 96