different between picket vs sentinel

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

1570s, from Middle French sentinelle, from Old Italian sentinella (perhaps via a notion of "perceive, watch", compare Italian sentire (“to feel, hear, smell”)), from Latin senti? (“feel, perceive by the senses”). See sense.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?s?nt?n?l/

Noun

sentinel (plural sentinels)

1. A sentry, watch, or guard.
   • 1719- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

     They promised faithfully to bear their confinement with patience, and were very thankful that they had such good usage as to have provisions and light left them; for Friday gave them candles (such as we made ourselves) for their comfort; and they did not know but that he stood sentinel over them at the entrance.

   • 1625, Francis Bacon, Of Empire

     that princes do keep due sentinel

2. (obsolete) A private soldier.
   • 1789, John Moore, Zeluco, Valancourt 2008, p. 33:

     “I will not permit the poorest centinel to be treated with injustice.”

3. (computer science) a unique string of characters recognised by a computer program for processing in a special way; a keyword.

4. A sentinel crab.
5. (attributive, medicine, epidemiology) A sign of a health risk (e.g. a disease, an adverse effect).

Translations

Verb

sentinel (third-person singular simple present sentinels, present participle (US) sentineling or (UK) sentinelling, simple past and past participle (US) sentineled or (UK) sentinelled)

1. (transitive) To watch over as a guard.

   He sentineled the north wall.

2. (transitive) To post as guard.

   He sentineled him on the north wall.

3. (transitive) To post a guard for.

   He sentineled the north wall with just one man.

   • 1873, Harper's New Monthly Magazine (volume 46, page 562)

     The old-fashioned stoop, with its suggestive benches on either side, lay solitary and silent in the moonlight; the garden path, weedily overgrown since father's death, and sentineled here and there with ragged hollyhock, lay quiet and dew-laden […]

Translations

Anagrams

• lenients