king
pronunciation
How to pronounce king in British English:
UK [kɪŋ]
How to pronounce king in American English:
US [kɪŋ]
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- Noun:
- a male sovereign; ruler of a kingdom
- a competitor who holds a preeminent position
- a very wealthy or powerful businessman
- preeminence in a particular category or group or field
- a checker that has been moved to the opponent's first row where it is promoted to a piece that is free to move either forward or backward
- one of the four playing cards in a deck bearing the picture of a king
- (chess) the weakest but the most important piece
Word Origin
- king
- king: [OE] The prehistoric Germanic ancestor of king (as of German könig, Dutch koning, Swedish konung, and Danish konge) was *kuninggaz. This seems to have been a derivative of *kunjam ‘race, people’ (source of English kin). If it was, king means etymologically ‘descendant of the race, offspring of the people’.=> kin
- king (n.)
- Old English cyning "king, ruler," from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz (cognates: Dutch koning, Old Norse konungr, Danish konge, Old Saxon and Old High German kuning, Middle High German künic, German König). Possibly related to Old English cynn "family, race" (see kin), making a king originally a "leader of the people;" or from a related root suggesting "noble birth," making a king originally "one who descended from noble birth." The sociological and ideological implications render this a topic of much debate. Finnish kuningas "king," Old Church Slavonic kunegu "prince" (Russian knyaz, Bohemian knez), Lithuanian kunigas "clergyman" are loans from Germanic. As leon is the king of bestes. [John Gower, "Confessio Amantis," 1390] In Old English, used for names of chiefs of Anglian and Saxon tribes or clans, then of the states they founded. Also extended to British and Danish chiefs they fought. The chess piece so called from early 15c.; the playing card from 1560s; use in checkers/draughts first recorded 1820. Applied in nature to species deemed remarkably big or dominant (such as king crab, 1690s). In marketing, king-size is from 1939, originally of cigarettes. [I]t was [Eugene] Field who haunted the declining years of Creston Clarke with his review of that actor's Lear. ... Said he, "Mr. Clarke played the King all the evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace." ["Theatre Magazine," January 1922]
Antonym
Example
- 1. You ask your king to his face .
- 2. And jehoshaphat his son succeeded him as king .
- 3. Paris without a king has as result the world without despots .
- 4. Everyone wants to claim the title of beef noodle king .
- 5. Was the king already dead ?