Definition of "king"

"I wish we were back in Tenth Street. But so many children came […] and the Tenth Street house wasn't half big enough; and a dreadful speculative builder built this house and persuaded Austin to buy it. Oh, dear, and here we are among the rich and great; and the steel kings and copper kings and oil kings and their heirs and dauphins. […]"

1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter I, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company

The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.

2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892

It would be difficult, for example, to imagine a bigger, more obvious subject for comedy than the laughable self-delusion of washed-up celebrities, especially if the washed-up celebrity in question is Adam West, a camp icon who can go toe to toe with William Shatner as the king of winking self-parody.

2012 June 3, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “Mr. Plow” (season 4, episode 9; originally aired 11/19/1992)”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)

Try asking for a king-size bed next time because kings are usually firmer.

2002, Scott W. Donkin, Gerard Meyer, Peak Performance: Body and Mind, page 119

The British Parliament has had made it for it in the past the claim that it could do anything excepting convert a woman into a man. […] And the high court [of Amsterdam] has done it by deciding that all officials and public servants shall take their oath of allegiance not to Queen Wilhelmina but to King Wilhelmina.

1891 January 3, ““King” Wilhelmina”, in The Chicago Daily Tribune, volume LI, number III, Chicago, Ill., page 5, column 7

Hatshepsut was ruling as a king, not queen and she needed to be recognised as such.

2009, Charlotte Booth, “Hatshepsut”, in The Curse of the Mummy and Other Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, Oneworld Publications, page 93

The act of perforating one’s ears could be read as a gendering performance—a modification from an overt masculinity (king) to a tempered female masculinity (king with female traits)—in which the male king was expected to adopt the quintessence of Omeppa’s female king wife, Ebulejonu, and by so doing, embody the true essence of womanhood. […] Attah-Ebulejonu, like Hatshepsut of Egypt before her, ruled as (and was remembered as) a king, not queen, perhaps setting the precedent for the coronation of another female king, Ahebi Ugbabe, about four centuries later. […] This time, the female king would not rule in the Igala kingdom nor would she be of Igala origin. Instead, the king would be an Igbo woman who had lived in Igalaland for many years, who had come of age and matured there and in the process had imbibed the cultural values and mores of the people with whom she had lived in exile.

2011, Nwando Achebe, “Mgbapu Ahebi: Exile in Igalaland, ca. 1895–1916”, in The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, Bloomington, Ind., Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, pages 63–64

The kinging of Macbeth is the business of the first part of the play […] .

1982, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, South Atlantic Review, Volume 47, page 16

One narrative is the kinging and unkinging of Macbeth; the other narrative is the attack on Banquo's line and that line's eventual accession and supposed Jacobean survival through Malcolm's successful counter-attack on Macbeth.

2008, William Shakespeare, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, Macbeth, Introduction, page 24

And let us do it with no show of fear; / No, with no more than if we heard that England / Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance; / For, my good liege, she is so idly king’d, / Her sceptre so fantastically borne / By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth, / That fear attends her not.

1599, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act II, scene iv]

He had to do all his kinging after supper, which left him no time for roystering with the nobility and certain others.

1918, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, The Railroad Trainman, Volume 35, page 675

Second, Mentor (the old man) combined the wisdom of experience with the sensitivity of a fawn in his attempts to convey kinging skills to young Telemachus.

2001, Chip R. Bell, Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning, page 6

The seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de Gotha of Congregation Emanu-el. Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among the Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an immigrant youth, and who now owned hundreds of rich farm acres, besides houses, mills and banks, kinged it from the front seat of the center section.

1917, Edna Ferber, Fanny Herself, page 32

If the machine does this, it will lose only one point, and as it is not looking far enough ahead, it cannot see that it has not prevented its opponent from kinging but only postponed the evil day.

1957, Bertram Vivian Bowden, editor, Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, page 302

I was about to make a move that would corner a piece that she was trying to get kinged, but I slid my checker back […] .

1986, Rick DeMarinis, The Burning Women of Far Cry, page 100

Through the ex-centric diaspora, kinging in postcolonial Australia has become a site of critical hybridity where diasporic female masculinities have emerged through the contestations of "home" and "host" cultures.

2008, Audrey Yue, “King Victoria: Asian Drag Kings, Postcolonial Female Masculinity, and Hybrid Sexuality in Australia”, in Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Audrey Yue, Mark McLelland, editors, AsiaPacifQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, page 266