queen bee
5
5.8
- noun
- /kwin bi/
- Informal
:
líder del grupo
- She's the queen bee.
So that's why Mariah Carey, of course, Queen Bee herself.
- So that's why Mariah Carey, of course, Queen Bee herself.
- It will be high school all over again with gossip and people being excluded with the queen bee narcissist pulling the strings but playing completely innocent.
- And she walked in Queen Bee like, oh, you are absolutely my idol.
Examples
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What do you think you are around here, the queen bee?
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At the school, Jessica is known as the queen bee because she influences all the social events.
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Is that the queen bee of the bunch?
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You show up here last week and have appointed yourself queen bee.
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What did you mean when you said Nola's the queen bee?
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She's the queen bee, all right.
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And I would have been queen bee and I couldn't have cared less.
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And Gretchen found herself a new clique and a new queen bee to serve.
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Oprah used to be the queen bee for spawning this kind of craze.
Blog text (18) -
She said in sales there is usually one queen bee that everyone cowtows to, but because she made the office environment fun, she had a bunch of queen bees that loved each other.
Blog text (28)
Synonyms
Antonyms
How Dominant
Surface Forms
Morphology
queen + bee
The compound is directly interpretable from its parts: 'queen' denotes the female leader and 'bee' evokes the social, hierarchical insect group, so together they straightforwardly suggest a dominant female within a group. This beehive-as-social-group metaphor is common cross-linguistically and follows a simple compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both words will very likely infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Queen bee comes from that hive image: because the queen bee is the center of the hive, people began using the name for a woman who is 'in charge' of a group and controls its social life.