queens

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of queen.

   The history book traced the reigns of several powerful queens.

   Two queens cannot legally start on adjacent squares in this puzzle.

   Note

   A regular plural that covers every human sense of the noun: female monarchs, the wives or widows of kings, and women preeminent in a field. The same spelling does two other jobs on this page. It is also the present-tense verb (she queens a pawn) and the poker hand. Word order usually settles which one is meant: a determiner before it signals the noun, and a subject before it signals the verb.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of queen.

   Whenever she queens a pawn, her opponent tends to resign.

   The grandmaster queens his passed pawn and converts the advantage cleanly.

   Note

   The verb is mostly a specialist's word. A chess player queens a pawn by promoting it, and a beekeeper queens a colony by giving it a new queen. Both uses take a direct object. The older intransitive sense of behaving imperiously is obsolete. A slang sexual sense also exists, so the surrounding context should make the chess or beekeeping meaning unmistakable.

3. 3
   nounslang

   A pair of queens held by a player, especially as a starting hand in poker.

   Looking down at queens, she shoved her entire stack into the middle.

   He slow-played his queens until the turn, hoping to trap an aggressive rival.

   Similarladies

   Note

   Card players name a pair by its rank alone, so two queens in the hand simply become queens. The word behaves like the name of a single holding. It takes a possessive (his queens) and a verb of looking (looking down at queens), and you hold it rather than count it. This is table talk; in neutral prose, a pair of queens is the safer phrasing.

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