Notes: What a difference an A makes! The semantic spread between queen and quean could not be greater: from a woman of the highest repute to one of the lowest. The adjective queanish (adverb queanishly) means "like a quean, in a queanly manner". Queanry is the stuff queans are made of.

In Play: Today's lexical golden oldie can lead to some very humorous misunderstandings if not used with care: "Heidi Fleiss was the queen of Hollywood queans until her arrest." The possibilities for wordplay are endless: "La cage aux folles is a hilarious movie set in a night club that sponsors a nightly beauty quean pageant."

Word History: In Old English cwene "woman" and cwen "queen" were pronounced differently even though they were derived from the same Old Germanic word, kweniz. The root of this word goes back to Proto-Indo-European gwen- "woman" which emerged in Greek as gyne "woman", the root of the borrowed English word, gynecology. In Russian the same PIE word became žena "wife" and, in Persian, zan "woman". In Irish Gaelic the same root became bean "woman" which is used with sídhe "fairy" in the phrase bean sídhe "wailing female spirit of death". English collapsed this phrase into one word: banshee.

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