king: the supreme human ruler of a people or empire
In Biblical Aramaic this is the ordinary word for a king, the single sovereign who holds top authority over a kingdom. It belongs entirely to the Aramaic sections of Ezra and Daniel, where the action centers on the great Gentile courts: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius, Cyrus, and Artaxerxes. The word names the office of the one man at the top, the giver of decrees, the commander of armies, the judge whose word stands as law.
The word carries no sense beyond this. Whether it speaks of a living monarch on his throne, of kings in general as a class of rulers, or of the title attached to a named emperor, it always points to the same thing: the person who reigns. Daniel sharpens this by setting these human kings against the God of heaven, who raises them up and removes them and is himself the true King over every kingdom.
Readers should not confuse this Aramaic word with the spelling-identical Hebrew word for king, which belongs to a separate entry. They mean the same thing, but they sit in different languages and different parts of the Bible.