Word.ws English Dictionary

empresse

empresse is the obsolete form of empress.

Meaning of empress

Noun

empress (plural empresses)

  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.c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC...
  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.2008, Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe: Society in Transformation, page 211
  3. The third trump or major arcana card of most tarot decks.
  4. (rare) A female chimpanzee.
  5. A deciduous tree, Paulownia tomentosa
  6. A fairy chess piece which combines the moves of the rook and the knight.

See all 8 meanings of empress

Forms of empresse

pluralempresses

Questions about empresse

What is empresse the obsolete form of?
Empresse is the obsolete form of empress.

Words near empresse in the dictionary

  1. empress dowager
  2. empress dowagers
  3. empress regnant
  4. empress tree
  5. empress trees
  6. empresse
  7. empressed
  8. empressement
  9. empressements
  10. empresses
  11. empresses dowager

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: empresse (page history and authors); empress (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “empresse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/empresse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.