The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

Pharaoh \Pha"raoh\, n. [Heb. par[=o]h; of Egyptian origin: cf.
   L. pharao, Gr. faraw`. Cf. Faro.]
   1. A title by which the sovereigns of ancient Egypt were
      designated.
      [1913 Webster]

   2. See Faro.
      [1913 Webster]

   Pharaoh's chicken (Zool.), the gier-eagle, or Egyptian
      vulture; -- so called because often sculpured on Egyptian
      monuments. It is nearly white in color.

   Pharaoh's rat (Zool.), the common ichneumon.
      [1913 Webster]

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):

Pharaoh
    n 1: the title of the ancient Egyptian kings [syn: Pharaoh,
         Pharaoh of Egypt]

Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:

46 Moby Thesaurus words for "pharaoh":
   Dalai Lama, Holy Roman Emperor, Inca, Kaiser, Simon Legree,
   absolute monarch, absolute ruler, all-powerful ruler, ardri,
   arrogator, autarch, autocrat, bey, cacique, caesar, cham,
   commissar, czar, despot, dictator, disciplinarian, driver, duce,
   hard master, kaid, khan, martinet, mikado, negus, oligarch,
   oppressor, padishah, pendragon, rig, sachem, sagamore, shah,
   sheikh, shogun, slave driver, stickler, tenno, tycoon, tyrant,
   usurper, warlord



Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary:

Pharaoh
   the official title borne by the Egyptian kings down to the time
   when that country was conquered by the Greeks. (See EGYPT.) The name is a compound, as some think, of the words
   Ra, the "sun" or "sun-god," and the article phe, "the,"
   prefixed; hence phera, "the sun," or "the sun-god." But others,
   perhaps more correctly, think the name derived from Perao, "the
   great house" = his majesty = in Turkish, "the Sublime Porte."

     (1.) The Pharaoh who was on the throne when Abram went down
   into Egypt (Gen. 12:10-20) was probably one of the Hyksos, or
   "shepherd kings." The Egyptians called the nomad tribes of Syria
   Shasu, "plunderers," their king or chief Hyk, and hence the name
   of those invaders who conquered the native kings and established
   a strong government, with Zoan or Tanis as their capital. They
   were of Semitic origin, and of kindred blood accordingly with
   Abram. They were probably driven forward by the pressure of the
   Hittites. The name they bear on the monuments is "Mentiu."

     (2.) The Pharaoh of Joseph's days (Gen. 41) was probably
   Apopi, or Apopis, the last of the Hyksos kings. To the old
   native Egyptians, who were an African race, shepherds were "an
   abomination;" but to the Hyksos kings these Asiatic shepherds
   who now appeared with Jacob at their head were congenial, and
   being akin to their own race, had a warm welcome (Gen. 47:5, 6).
   Some argue that Joseph came to Egypt in the reign of Thothmes
   III., long after the expulsion of the Hyksos, and that his
   influence is to be seen in the rise and progress of the
   religious revolution in the direction of monotheism which
   characterized the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The wife of
   Amenophis III., of that dynasty, was a Semite. Is this singular
   fact to be explained from the presence of some of Joseph's
   kindred at the Egyptian court? Pharaoh said to Joseph, "Thy
   father and thy brethren are come unto thee: the land of Egypt is
   before thee; in the best of the land make thy father and
   brethren to dwell" (Gen. 47:5, 6).

     (3.) The "new king who knew not Joseph" (Ex. 1:8-22) has been
   generally supposed to have been Aahmes I., or Amosis, as he is
   called by Josephus. Recent discoveries, however, have led to the
   conclusion that Seti was the "new king."

     For about seventy years the Hebrews in Egypt were under the
   powerful protection of Joseph. After his death their condition
   was probably very slowly and gradually changed. The invaders,
   the Hyksos, who for some five centuries had been masters of
   Egypt, were driven out, and the old dynasty restored. The
   Israelites now began to be looked down upon. They began to be
   afflicted and tyrannized over. In process of time a change
   appears to have taken place in the government of Egypt. A new
   dynasty, the Nineteenth, as it is called, came into power under
   Seti I., who was its founder. He associated with him in his
   government his son, Rameses II., when he was yet young, probably
   ten or twelve years of age.

     Note, Professor Maspero, keeper of the museum of Bulak, near
   Cairo, had his attention in 1870 directed to the fact that
   scarabs, i.e., stone and metal imitations of the beetle (symbols
   of immortality), originally worn as amulets by royal personages,
   which were evidently genuine relics of the time of the ancient
   Pharaohs, were being sold at Thebes and different places along
   the Nile. This led him to suspect that some hitherto
   undiscovered burial-place of the Pharaohs had been opened, and
   that these and other relics, now secretly sold, were a part of
   the treasure found there. For a long time he failed, with all
   his ingenuity, to find the source of these rare treasures. At
   length one of those in the secret volunteered to give
   information regarding this burial-place. The result was that a
   party was conducted in 1881 to Dier el-Bahari, near Thebes, when
   the wonderful discovery was made of thirty-six mummies of kings,
   queens, princes, and high priests hidden away in a cavern
   prepared for them, where they had lain undisturbed for thirty
   centuries. "The temple of Deir el-Bahari stands in the middle of
   a natural amphitheatre of cliffs, which is only one of a number
   of smaller amphitheatres into which the limestone mountains of
   the tombs are broken up. In the wall of rock separating this
   basin from the one next to it some ancient Egyptian engineers
   had constructed the hiding-place, whose secret had been kept for
   nearly three thousand years." The exploring party being guided
   to the place, found behind a great rock a shaft 6 feet square
   and about 40 feet deep, sunk into the limestone. At the bottom
   of this a passage led westward for 25 feet, and then turned
   sharply northward into the very heart of the mountain, where in
   a chamber 23 feet by 13, and 6 feet in height, they came upon
   the wonderful treasures of antiquity. The mummies were all
   carefully secured and brought down to Bulak, where they were
   deposited in the royal museum, which has now been removed to
   Ghizeh.

     Among the most notable of the ancient kings of Egypt thus
   discovered were Thothmes III., Seti I., and Rameses II. Thothmes
   III. was the most distinguished monarch of the brilliant
   Eighteenth Dynasty. When this mummy was unwound "once more,
   after an interval of thirty-six centuries, human eyes gazed on
   the features of the man who had conquered Syria and Cyprus and
   Ethiopia, and had raised Egypt to the highest pinnacle of her
   power. The spectacle, however, was of brief duration. The
   remains proved to be in so fragile a state that there was only
   time to take a hasty photograph, and then the features crumbled
   to pieces and vanished like an apparition, and so passed away
   from human view for ever." "It seems strange that though the
   body of this man," who overran Palestine with his armies two
   hundred years before the birth of Moses, "mouldered to dust, the
   flowers with which it had been wreathed were so wonderfully
   preserved that even their colour could be distinguished"
   (Manning's Land of the Pharaohs).

     Seti I. (his throne name Merenptah), the father of Rameses
   II., was a great and successful warrior, also a great builder.
   The mummy of this Pharaoh, when unrolled, brought to view "the
   most beautiful mummy head ever seen within the walls of the
   museum. The sculptors of Thebes and Abydos did not flatter this
   Pharaoh when they gave him that delicate, sweet, and smiling
   profile which is the admiration of travellers. After a lapse of
   thirty-two centuries, the mummy retains the same expression
   which characterized the features of the living man. Most
   remarkable of all, when compared with the mummy of Rameses II.,
   is the striking resemblance between the father and the son. Seti
   I. is, as it were, the idealized type of Rameses II. He must
   have died at an advanced age. The head is shaven, the eyebrows
   are white, the condition of the body points to considerably more
   than threescore years of life, thus confirming the opinions of
   the learned, who have attributed a long reign to this king."

     (4.) Rameses II., the son of Seti I., is probably the Pharaoh
   of the Oppression. During his forty years' residence at the
   court of Egypt, Moses must have known this ruler well. During
   his sojourn in Midian, however, Rameses died, after a reign of
   sixty-seven years, and his body embalmed and laid in the royal
   sepulchre in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings beside that of his
   father. Like the other mummies found hidden in the cave of Deir
   el-Bahari, it had been for some reason removed from its original
   tomb, and probably carried from place to place till finally
   deposited in the cave where it was so recently discovered.

     In 1886, the mummy of this king, the "great Rameses," the
   "Sesostris" of the Greeks, was unwound, and showed the body of
   what must have been a robust old man. The features revealed to
   view are thus described by Maspero: "The head is long and small
   in proportion to the body. The top of the skull is quite bare.
   On the temple there are a few sparse hairs, but at the poll the
   hair is quite thick, forming smooth, straight locks about two
   inches in length. White at the time of death, they have been
   dyed a light yellow by the spices used in embalmment. The
   forehead is low and narrow; the brow-ridge prominent; the
   eye-brows are thick and white; the eyes are small and close
   together; the nose is long, thin, arched like the noses of the
   Bourbons; the temples are sunk; the cheek-bones very prominent;
   the ears round, standing far out from the head, and pierced,
   like those of a woman, for the wearing of earrings; the jaw-bone
   is massive and strong; the chin very prominent; the mouth small,
   but thick-lipped; the teeth worn and very brittle, but white and
   well preserved. The moustache and beard are thin. They seem to
   have been kept shaven during life, but were probably allowed to
   grow during the king's last illness, or they may have grown
   after death. The hairs are white, like those of the head and
   eyebrows, but are harsh and bristly, and a tenth of an inch in
   length. The skin is of an earthy-brown, streaked with black.
   Finally, it may be said, the face of the mummy gives a fair idea
   of the face of the living king. The expression is
   unintellectual, perhaps slightly animal; but even under the
   somewhat grotesque disguise of mummification there is plainly to
   be seen an air of sovereign majesty, of resolve, and of pride."

     Both on his father's and his mother's side it has been pretty
   clearly shown that Rameses had Chaldean or Mesopotamian blood in
   his veins to such a degree that he might be called an Assyrian.
   This fact is thought to throw light on Isa. 52:4.

     (5.) The Pharaoh of the Exodus was probably Menephtah I., the
   fourteenth and eldest surviving son of Rameses II. He resided at
   Zoan, where he had the various interviews with Moses and Aaron
   recorded in the book of Exodus. His mummy was not among those
   found at Deir el-Bahari. It is still a question, however,
   whether Seti II. or his father Menephtah was the Pharaoh of the
   Exodus. Some think the balance of evidence to be in favour of
   the former, whose reign it is known began peacefully, but came
   to a sudden and disastrous end. The "Harris papyrus," found at
   Medinet-Abou in Upper Egypt in 1856, a state document written by
   Rameses III., the second king of the Twentieth Dynasty, gives at
   length an account of a great exodus from Egypt, followed by
   wide-spread confusion and anarchy. This, there is great reason
   to believe, was the Hebrew exodus, with which the Nineteenth
   Dynasty of the Pharaohs came to an end. This period of anarchy
   was brought to a close by Setnekht, the founder of the Twentieth
   Dynasty.

     "In the spring of 1896, Professor Flinders Petrie discovered,
   among the ruins of the temple of Menephtah at Thebes, a large
   granite stela, on which is engraved a hymn of victory
   commemorating the defeat of Libyan invaders who had overrun the
   Delta. At the end other victories of Menephtah are glanced at,
   and it is said that 'the Israelites (I-s-y-r-a-e-l-u) are
   minished (?) so that they have no seed.' Menephtah was son and
   successor of Rameses II., the builder of Pithom, and Egyptian
   scholars have long seen in him the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The
   Exodus is also placed in his reign by the Egyptian legend of the
   event preserved by the historian Manetho. In the inscription the
   name of the Israelites has no determinative of 'country' or
   'district' attached to it, as is the case with all the other
   names (Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, Khar or Southern Palestine,
   etc.) mentioned along with it, and it would therefore appear
   that at the time the hymn was composed, the Israelites had
   already been lost to the sight of the Egyptians in the desert.
   At all events they must have had as yet no fixed home or
   district of their own. We may therefore see in the reference to
   them the Pharaoh's version of the Exodus, the disasters which
   befell the Egyptians being naturally passed over in silence, and
   only the destruction of the 'men children' of the Israelites
   being recorded. The statement of the Egyptian poet is a
   remarkable parallel to Ex. 1:10-22."

     (6.) The Pharaoh of 1 Kings 11:18-22.

     (7.) So, king of Egypt (2 Kings 17:4).

     (8.) The Pharaoh of 1 Chr. 4:18.

     (9.) Pharaoh, whose daughter Solomon married (1 Kings 3:1;
   7:8).

     (10.) Pharaoh, in whom Hezekiah put his trust in his war
   against Sennacherib (2 Kings 18:21).

     (11.) The Pharaoh by whom Josiah was defeated and slain at
   Megiddo (2 Chr. 35:20-24; 2 Kings 23:29, 30). (See NECHO.)

     (12.) Pharaoh-hophra, who in vain sought to relieve Jerusalem
   when it was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar (q.v.), 2 Kings 25:1-4;
   comp. Jer. 37:5-8; Ezek. 17:11-13. (See ZEDEKIAH.)


Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary (late 1800's):

Pharaoh, that disperses; that spoils