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empress

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɛmpɹəs//
  • //ɪmˈpɹɛs//

The female monarch (ruler) of an empire.

noun

  1. 1

    The female monarch (ruler) of an empire.

    Sit downe by her: adorned with my Crowne, As if thou wert the Empreſſe of the world.

  2. 2

    The wife or widow of an emperor or equated ruler.

    Empress, imperial regent, and even emperor herself (r. 797–802), Irene was an important and powerful figure at the Byzantine court in the late eighth and early ninth century.

  3. 3

    The third trump or major arcana card of most tarot decks.

  4. 4

    rareA female chimpanzee.

  5. 5

    A deciduous tree, Paulownia tomentosa

  6. 6

    A fairy chess piece which combines the moves of the rook and the knight.

Etymology

From Middle English emperice, emperesse, from Anglo-Norman and Old French empereriz, from Latin imperatrix, equivalent to emperor + -ess. Doublet of imperatrix. Compare modern French impératrice.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of impressrareRare form of impress.

Etymology

From Middle English empresse, from Anglo-Norman enpresser (“to press, to imprint”), from Old French empresser. Attested from the 15th or late 14th century.

Forms

plural
empresses
past tense
empressed
past participle
empressed
present participle
empressing
third person singular
empresses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).