I am searching for a fitting word for a story I am writing. The setting is fictional medieval (so not fully historical correct), and there is a group of bandits who have a leader.
I am wondering, how the bandit members would call their leader. Sir? Boss? Or is there a better word?
- In my opinion, "sir" sounds too honorable for a bandit, doesn't it?
- And "boss" sounds like a modern word to me and reminds me of modern gangsters.
As stated in the single-word-requests
tag rule, here an example sentence:
"We’re ready, sir. Do you want the black horse?"
Best Answer
chief dates from medieval times. The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions for chief, but the one applicable to your case is:
and the OED has a citation from 1297:
And the next two citations, of which the second is actually intelligible:
From reading the entire entry for chief, one sees that chief was a word widely used in medieval times, in many ways. For example:
So I think the bandits could well call their chief, chief, and how they would have spelled it (chef, chefe, cheef, chief, chief) is irrelevant because they were probably illiterate.
Addendum: See also Etymonline, chief