queen [OE] The Old English spelling of queen was cwēn. This originally meant ‘a wife’, specifically that of a king or some other important man. Related to cwēn was Old English cwene ‘woman’, which became the archaic quean, ‘a bold or impudent woman’, sometimes encountered in Shakespeare’s work. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was also a term for a prostitute. Because the two words came to be pronounced in the same way the derogatory sense dropped out of use as too confusing. The sense of queen ‘an effeminate gay man’ dates from the beginning of the 20th century.