Dictionaries › English

king

Pronunciation: /ˈkɪŋ/

The English word “king” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A male monarch; a man who heads a monarchy; in an absolute monarchy, the supreme ruler of his nation.
  2. The monarch with the most power and authority in a monarchy, regardless of sex.
  3. A male leader of a traditional Aboriginal group, often used as a title by colonists.
  4. A powerful or majorly influential person; someone who holds the preeminent position.
  5. Something that has a preeminent position.
  6. A man worthy of respect.
  7. 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.
  8. A playing card with the letter "K" and the image of a king on it, the thirteenth card in a given suit.
  9. 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.
  10. The central pin or skittle in bowling games.
  11. A male dragonfly; a drake.
  12. A reproductive caste of termites comprising males who remain in the colony mating with the queen and releasing pheromones that manage the other castes in the colony.
  13. A chinook salmon (king salmon).
  14. A group of animals whose tails have become entangled.
  15. A king-sized bed.
  16. A king skin.
  17. A vertex in a directed graph which can reach every other vertex via a path with a length of at most 2.

verb

  1. To crown king, to make (a person) king.
  2. To rule over as king.
  3. To perform the duties of a king.

Etymology

From Middle English king, kyng, kynge, from Old English cening, cing, cining, cuning, cyncg, cyneg, cyng, cyngc, cynig, cyning, king, kining, kuning, kyning, kyningc (“king”), from Proto-West Germanic *kuning, from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz, *kunungaz (“king”), from *kunją (“clan, family, kin”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁- (“to produce; to beget”). Equivalent to kin + -ing. Doublet of cyning…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “king” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.