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CLPadvocate
from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman
shantara
Thank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.
memsom
"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.
atiedebee
> There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages

Correct me if I am misunderstanding what you meant, but Dutch has koningin and German has Königin? They are basically a feminized version of king.

aitchnyu
Did Japanese get a similar word by coincidence?
DonaldFisk
Another cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.
jinushaun
Article is about AI and vector spaces, but queen literally means ”wife/woman” in old English. Disappointed. Thought this would be an article on etymology.
[dead] amelius
[flagged]
ForceBru
You shoehorned politics into a completely unrelated discussion, consequently making it worse
zkmon
Ok, let's say "cash is king". What is queen?

Arithmetic is king = royalty + male, while queen = royalty + female

But then it makes all these words just arithmetic values without meaning. Even if the words "royalty" and "male" can be sum or difference of some other words and so on - all are just numbers, no meaning at all.

DonHopkins
Cash is the Man in Black. Elvis is King.
mejutoco
I asked deepseek and after many options the recommended one was:

Cash flow, "because you need the ongoing stream, not just a pile of cash, to reign successfully".

hahahahhaah
queen is going to be a funny vector, mostly royalty, slightly chess, a bit gay, a bit rock and roll, a bit bee. Finally:

Queen + One = King

fruitworks
If I had to guess, cash - king + queen = credit (or money or something?). You are just asking the same thing as cash - man + woman, or "What is the feminine version of cash?" because queen - king ~= woman - man.

I say credit, because it is not as physical and direct as cash, so perhaps it is perceptually more feminine?

But I will have to check the next time I work with word2vec.

HPsquared
Can you embed a phrase like that in the same way?
wongarsu
cash - king + queen = cashing, cash - male + female = cashing (in qwen3-embedding:0.6b). Make of that what you will
amelius
In the example abs(woman) > abs(man).

Any reason why this is the case?

damnitbuilds
actor - man + woman is actress and always will be, no matter how woke you are.
DonaldFisk
It's telling that king – man + woman = queen is the only example I've ever seen used to explain word2vec.

I prefer the old school

    king(X) :- monarch(X), male(X).
    queen(X) :- monarch(X), female(X).
    queen(X) :- wife(Y, X), king(Y).

    monarch(elizabeth).
    female(elizabeth).
    wife(philip, elizabeth).
    monarch(charles).
    male(charles).
    wife(charles, camilla).

    ?- queen(camilla).
    true.

    ?- king(charles).
    true.

    ?- king(philip).
    false.
where definitions are human readable rules and words are symbols.
robocat
What happens when you add

  male(philip).
If you're missing that rule then you're getting what you would expect?
stared
Author here. Thank you for this excavation!

I fixed some math rendering - it has suffered after some migration.