Why king and queen rather than king and kingess?
Dukes have duchesses, counts countesses, princes princesses, mayors mayoresses, and even emperors empresses. Yet kings have queens rather than say, kingesses. Why is this so? If this was due to some historical quirk of fate, was there ever a word similar to kingess which was superseded by queen?
How about lords, ladies, and ... lordesses?
Solution 1:
Queen has its origins in a pre-English word meaning simply ‘wife’. Beyond that, we need to look for anthropological and social, rather than linguistic, reasons why a king’s wife should not have had a more distinctive description.
Lord comes from Old English hláford, meaning ‘keeper of the bread’. Since this was presumably a role denied women, the need for a feminine form didn’t arise.
Solution 2:
It has to do with the origins of the words.
-ess words
All the words that end in -ess came to English with the Norman Invasion from French and Latin. In fact, the suffix -ess is itself derived from French -esse. So words ending in -ess are of French origin. Almost all of them came to be used from Middle English (ME) onwards:
- duchess: from ME duchesse
- goddess: from ME goddesse
- princess: from ME princesse etc.
King and queen on the other hand come from Anglo-Saxon.
King and queen
King and queen are both native English words--Anglo-Saxon words:
- king comes from Old English cyning (alt. cyng)
- queen comes from Old English cwēn
cwēn originally meant a wife, specifically that of a king or another important man. Etymonline says that the original sense (i.e. wife) has been specialized by Old English to wife of a king.
Larry Trask suggests that the current meaning of 'queen' is 'improved' because of 'Melioration' (Semantic change). Melioration is an improvement in meaning. He says that queen formerly just meant 'woman', but today it means queen (the female monarch of a kingdom). [Trask's Historical Linguistcs]
In summary, all the -ess words are French/Latinate words while king and queen are native words and don't take these endings.