different between picket vs column

English

Etymology

From French piquet, from piquer (“to pierce”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /?p?k?t/
• Rhymes: -?k?t
• Hyphenation: pick?et

Noun

picket (countable and uncountable, plural pickets)

1. A stake driven into the ground.

2. (historical) A type of punishment by which an offender had to rest his or her entire body weight on the top of a small stake.
3. A tool in mountaineering that is driven into the snow and used as an anchor or to arrest falls.
4. (military) One of the soldiers or troops placed on a line forward of a position to warn against an enemy advance; or any unit (for example, an aircraft or ship) performing a similar function.
   • 1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society 2010, p. 59:

     So confident was he that he ignored the warning of his two British advisers to post pickets to watch the river, and even withdrew those they had placed there.

5. (sometimes figuratively) A sentry.
6. A protester positioned outside an office, workplace etc. during a strike (usually in plural); also the protest itself.
7. (card games, uncountable) The card game piquet.

Derived terms

• picket line
• picket pin
• picket rope

Translations

Verb

picket (third-person singular simple present pickets, present participle picketing, simple past and past participle picketed)

1. (intransitive) To protest, organized by a labour union, typically in front of the location of employment.
2. (transitive) To enclose or fortify with pickets or pointed stakes.
3. (transitive) To tether to, or as if to, a picket.

   to picket a horse

4. (transitive) To guard, as a camp or road, by an outlying picket.
5. (obsolete, transitive) To torture by forcing to stand with one foot on a pointed stake.

Derived terms

• picketing (noun)
• unpicketed

German

Pronunciation

Verb

picket

1. second-person plural subjunctive I of picken

English

Etymology

From Middle English columne, columpne, columpe, borrowed from Old French columne, from Latin columna (“a column, pillar, post”), originally a collateral form of columen, contraction culmen (“a pillar, top, crown, summit”). Akin to Latin collis (“a hill”), celsus (“high”), probably to Ancient Greek ??????? (koloph?n, “top, summit”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?k?l?m/
• (General American), (Ireland) enPR: k?l??m, IPA^(key): /?k?l?m/
• (General American, rare), (Ireland) enPR: k?l?j?m, IPA^(key): /?k?lj?m/
• Hyphenation: col?umn
• Rhymes: -?l?m

Noun

column (plural columns)

1. (architecture) A solid upright structure designed usually to support a larger structure above it, such as a roof or horizontal beam, but sometimes for decoration.
2. A vertical line of entries in a table, usually read from top to bottom.
3. A body of troops or army vehicles, usually strung out along a road.
4. A body of text meant to be read line by line, especially in printed material that has multiple adjacent such on a single page.

5. A unit of width, especially of advertisements, in a periodical, equivalent to the width of a usual column of text.

6. (by extension) A recurring feature in a periodical, especially an opinion piece, especially by a single author or small rotating group of authors, or on a single theme.

7. Something having similar vertical form or structure to the things mentioned above, such as a spinal column.
8. (botany) The gynostemium
9. (chemistry) An object used to separate the different components of a liquid or to purify chemical compounds.

Synonyms

• (upright structure): post, pillar, sile

Antonyms

• (line of table entries): row (which is horizontal)

Hypernyms

• (upright structure): beam

Derived terms

Translations

Further reading

• column in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• column in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.