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from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman


There is a nice "all women are queen, literally", https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOY-vXuAiBA

And a longer text, https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/

Also, gynecology has the same roots.


Thank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.


"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.


> There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages

Correct me if I am misunderstanding what you meant, but Dutch has koningin and German has Königin? They are basically a feminized version of king.


Did Japanese get a similar word by coincidence?


https://jisho.org/search/queen : which word did you mean?

The translator's curse of a language having lots of synonyms, the subtleties of which don't map directly on to English. None of those seem particularly similar to queen/kvinne?



Another cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.




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