means A female monarch who rules in her own right, or the wife of a king — and by extension the dominant or most celebrated figure in any domain.

from From Old English cwēn, meaning simply 'woman' or 'wife,' and especially a king's wife. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root (compare Old Norse kvǣn) and is a distant cousin of Greek gynē, 'woman' (the gyn- in gynecology). The word climbed in status over centuries: what once meant any woman narrowed and rose to mean the woman — the one on the throne. Worth noting it is unrelated to the look-alike 'quean,' an old word for a lowborn or disreputable woman, which shared the same ancient root but tumbled the opposite direction.