(n): small air-breathing arthropod
(n): a female sovereign ruler
(n): a woman who is an aristocrat
(n): the wife or widow of a king
(n): a woman who is an aristocrat
(n): something personified as a woman who is considered the best or most important of her kind
(n): a person who represents an abstract quality
(n): a competitor who holds a preeminent position
(n): the contestant you hope to defeat
(n): offensive term for an openly homosexual man
(n): a homosexual man
(n): one of four face cards in a deck bearing a picture of a queen
(n): one of the twelve cards in a deck bearing a picture of a face
(n): (chess) the most powerful piece
(n): any of 16 white and 16 black pieces used in playing the game of chess
(n): an especially large mole rat and the only member of a colony of naked mole rats to bear offspring which are sired by only a few males
(n): fetal-looking colonial rodent of East Africa; neither mole nor rat; they feed on tubers and have a social structure similar to that of honeybees and termites
(n): female cat
(n): any domesticated member of the genus Felis
(v): promote to a queen, as of a pawn in chess
(v): change a pawn for a better piece by advancing it to the eighth row, or change a checker piece for a more valuable piece by moving it to the row closest to your opponent
(v): become a queen
(v): be changed for a superior chess or checker piece
Perhaps there are countries where the word most immediately conjures up thoughts of insects, but I don't live in one of those.
I think the rook is an odder chessman, though.
In chess, the queen is one of the chessmen, very strange.