king

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

Noun

  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.
    • Charles the third became the new king of England from 2022.
  2. The monarch with the most power and authority in a monarchy, regardless of sex.
    • 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...
    • Hatshepsut was ruling as a king, not queen and she needed to be recognised as such. - 2009, Charlotte Booth, “Hatshepsut”, in The Curse of the Mummy and Other Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, Oneworld Publications, →ISBN,...
    • 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...
  3. A male leader of a traditional Aboriginal group, often used as a title by colonists.
    • Old Culwaddy the ‘king’, squatting by the galley fire, looked up questioningly[.] - 1937, Ion L. Idriess, Over the Range, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, published 1947, page 56:
  4. A powerful or majorly influential person; someone who holds the preeminent position.
    • Howard Stern styled himself as the "king of all media".
    • "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...
    • I'd been the dodgem car king at the Brisbane Ekka in 1975 and all those skills can flooding back[.] - 1995, Paul Vautin, Turn It Up!, Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, page 154:
  5. Something that has a preeminent position.
    • In times of financial panic, cash is king.
    • 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...
  6. A component of certain games.
    • The objective of each player is to place the opponent’s king ‘under attack’ in such a way that the opponent has no legal move. […] If the arbiter observes both kings are in check, or a pawn stands on the rank furthest...

    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.

      Hypernyms: court card face card playing card card

      Coordinate Terms: queen jack knave

    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.

      • 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. - 1878, John Henry Walsh, British Rural Sports, page 712:
  7. A king skin.
    • Oi mate, have you got kings?
  8. A male dragonfly; a drake.
  9. A king-sized bed.
    • Try asking for a king-size bed next time because kings are usually firmer. - 2002, Scott W. Donkin, Gerard Meyer, Peak Performance: Body and Mind, page 119:
  10. A vertex in a directed graph which can reach every other vertex via a path with a length of at most 2.

Origin

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 and knez. Cognates Cognate with Yola king, kinge (“king”), North Frisian kining, köning (“king”), Saterland Frisian Kening, König, Köänig (“king”), West Frisian kening (“king”), Alemannic German Chüng, Künig (“king”), Bavarian Kini (“king”), Central Franconian Künning (“king”), Cimbrian khuuneg (“king”), Dutch koning (“king”), German König (“king”), Luxembourgish Kinnek (“king”), Vilamovian kyng (“king”), Yiddish קעניג (kenig), קיניג (kinig, “king”), Danish kong, konge, konning (“king”),...

Forms

kings kinge kyng kynge

Synonyms

Rex roy

Related

♔ ♚

Derived

a cat can look at a king a cat may look at a king antiking archking bare king bean king California king cash is king Charlton Kings chicken à la King chicken à la king client king complain king divine right of kings drag king dragonking drama king elf-king elf king erl-king every king needs a queen Fisher King fit for a king foreking

Noun alt of, alternative

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

Forms

kings

Verb

  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 […] .
    • 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...
  2. To rule over as king.
    • 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...
  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.
    • 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. - 2001, Chip R. Bell, Managers as Mentors: Building...
  4. To assume or pretend preeminence (over); to lord it over.
    • 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...
  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.
    • 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. - 1957, Bertram Vivian...
    • 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[…]. - 1986, Rick DeMarinis, The Burning Women of Far Cry, page 100:
  6. To dress and perform as a drag king.
    • 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. -...

Forms

kings kinging kinged kinge kyng kynge