Quean and Queen

These two terms have a complex and interwoven history encapsulating the binary image of woman as contemptible whore and admired regent. Quean (pronounced “quayne”) always denoted a woman of low class and has become an obsolete term for a prostitute, while queen has an ambivalent status, having maintained its royal meaning from Anglo-Saxon up to modern times, but also acquiring associations of prostitution and homosexuality. The confusion between the terms no doubt started with the evident similarity of origin ( quean from Anglo-Saxon cwene , and queen from Anglo-Saxon cwen ) and was aggravated by the basic instability of spelling in Middle English.

From this period quean , which originally meant simply “a woman,” became in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary , “a term of disparagement and abuse,” illustrated in a quotation from ca. 1290: “An olde quene ther was biside, strong hore and baudestrote [bawd].” A century later in Piers Plowman , William Langland plays on the similarity and difference of the terms, noting wryly that "in the charnel [crypt] it is difficult to tell “a queyne fro a queene” (C Text ix, 46). Lord Byron is one of the last to play on the two terms in Don Juan (1811) in this chauvinist tirade: “This martial scold, / This modern Amazon, and queen of queans” (VI, xcvi). However, in Scots quean has retained its innocence and means simply “a lass or robust girl.” As the term became obsolete in English, so people started to confuse it with queen and pronounce it similarly.

According to Jane Mills in Womanwords , “the sexual derogation of queen began in the reign of Queen Victoria, when the word was used for an attractive woman, a ‘girlfriend’ or sexual partner” (1989, 203). The OED gives instances up to 1975, but most are not derogatory. The homosexual sense has been traced to a quotation in the Australian paper, the Sydney Truth in 1924: " Queen , effeminate person," (6), implying “the effeminate partner in a homosexual relationship” (OED) . However Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Historical Slang (1937) has the entry: " Quean; incorrectly queen , a homosexual, esp. one with girlish manners and carriage; obsolete except in Australia." J.R. Ackerley’s posthumously published autobiography My Father and Myself (1968) has this personal comment: “I did want him to think me ‘queer’ and himself part of homosexuality, a term I disliked because it included prostitutes, pansies, pouffs and queans” (xii, 127). However, the Australian National Dictionary (1988) does not acknowledge either form. Queen has since become the established form in most global varieties of English, both as an independent form and in less critical compounds such as drag queen , recorded in 1959 in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (6).