king
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: enpr: kĭng
ipa: /kɪŋ/
text: Audio — the king
note: US, pre-/ŋ/ tensing
ipa: [kʰiŋ]
note: without NG-coalescence
ipa: [kʰɪŋɡ]
rhymes: -ɪŋ
Forms: form: kings
form: kinging
form: kinged
form: kinged
form: kyng
form: kynge
form: kinge
Etymology: From Middle English king, kyng, from Old English cyng, cyning (“king”), from Proto-West Germanic *kuning, from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz, *kunungaz (“king”), equivalent to kin + -ing. Doublet of cyning and knez.
Cognate with Scots keeng (“king”), North Frisian köning (“king”), West Frisian kening (“king”), Dutch koning (“king”), Low German Koning, Köning (“king”), German König (“king”), Danish konge (“king”), Norwegian konge, Swedish konung, kung (“king”), Icelandic konungur, kóngur (“king”), Polish ksiądz (“priest”), Russian князь (knjazʹ, “prince”), Old Church Slavonic кънѧѕь (kŭnędzĭ), Romanian chinez, Finnish kuningas (“king”), Estonian kuningas, Ingrian kunigas, Karelian kuninkas, Livvi kuńingas, Ludian kuńingas, Veps kuningaz, Võro kuning and Votic kunikaz. Eclipsed non-native Middle English roy (“king”) (Early Modern English roy), borrowed from Old French roi, rei, rai (“king”).
The verb is inherited from Middle English kyngen, *kingen (“To perform the duties of a king”), itself from the noun king, kyng.
Senses: examples: text: 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 […] .
text: 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.
ref: 2008, William Shakespeare, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, Macbeth, Introduction, page 24:
glosses: To crown king, to make (a person) king.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iv]:
glosses: To rule over as king.
examples: text: 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.
text: 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.
ref: 2001, Chip R. Bell, Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning, page 6:
glosses: To perform the duties of a king.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1917, Edna Ferber, Fanny Herself, page 32:
glosses: To assume or pretend preeminence (over); to lord it over.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1957, Bertram Vivian Bowden, editor, Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, page 302:
text: 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[…].
ref: 1986, Rick DeMarinis, The Burning Women of Far Cry, page 100:
glosses: 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.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 2008, Audrey Yue, “King Victoria: Asian Drag Kings, Postcolonial Female Masculinity, and Hybrid Sexuality in Australia”, in Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Audrey Yue, Mark McLelland, editors, AsiaPacifQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, page 266:
glosses: To dress and perform as a drag king.