king

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 public servants shall take their oath of allegiance not to Queen Wilhelmina but to King Wilhelmina.”

   “Hatshepsut was ruling as a king, not queen and she needed to be recognised as such.”

3. (Australia, historical)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[.]”

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 we are among the rich and great; and the steel kings and copper kings and oil kings and their heirs and dauphins.[…]"”

   “I'd been the dodgem car king at the Brisbane Ekka in 1975 and all those skills can flooding back[.]”

   “The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.”

5. (countable, uncountable)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 icon who can go toe to toe with William Shatner as the king of winking self-parody.”

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 from its starting position, he/she shall wait until the next move is completed.”

7. A component of certain games.
8. A component of certain games.
9. A component of certain 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.”

10. (UK, slang)A king skin.

    “Oi mate, have you got kings?”

11. A male dragonfly; a drake.
12. A king-sized bed.

    “Try asking for a king-size bed next time because kings are usually firmer.”

13. A vertex in a directed graph which can reach every other vertex via a path with a length of at most 2.
14. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of qing (“Chinese musical instrument”).
15. radiotelephony clear-code word for the letter K.
16. The title of a king.

    “As we climbed the Marykirk Bank Ogilvie spoke of the passes leading over to Deeside, and of the Royal deer forests around Balmoral; then, with mingled pride and modesty, he added, "I've driven the King seven times."”

    “One, a grant by Archbishop Wulfred to that community, is datable to 825x32; while the other two (both copies of the same document) record an agreement between Archbishop Ceolnoth and Kings Egbert and Æthelwulf which was enacted in 838.”

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 Macbeth.”

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 vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth, / That fear attends her not.”

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.”

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 hundreds of rich farm acres, besides houses, mills and banks, kinged it from the front seat of the center section.”

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.”

   “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[…].”

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.”

name

1. (countable, uncountable)An English and Scottish surname transferred from the nickname, originally a nickname for someone who either acted as if he were a king or had worked in the king's household.

   “The Russians clinched the victory when Vera Zvonareva rallied to defeat Vania King, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, in the first reverse singles match, giving her team a 3-0 lead. […] After Russia went ahead, 3-0, Ahsha Rolle defeated Elena Vesnina, 6-3, 6-4, then King paired with Liezel Huber to beat Vesnina and Svetlana Kuznetsova, 7-6 (3), 6-4, in the doubles.”

   “So when King – who had been in Atlanta for “Bloody Sunday” – telegrammed Parks about returning to Alabama to take part in a third mass march from Selma to Montgomery, her immediate answer was “Why, of course.””

2. (UK, countable, uncountable)King class, a class of steam locomotives once used on the GWR.
3. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
4. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
5. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
6. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
7. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
8. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
9. (countable, uncountable)A number of places in the United States:
10. (countable, uncountable)A township in the Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada.
11. (countable, uncountable)A village on New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.