picket
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]
A white picket fence (sense 1)
Pickets (noun sense 6) picketing (verb sense 1) in front of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Bristol, UK, during a strike in May 2005.
From French piquet, from piquer (“to pierce”).
Pronunciation
[edit]- (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈpɪkɪt/
Audio (General American): (file) - Hyphenation: pick‧et
- Rhymes: -ɪkɪt
Noun
[edit]picket (countable and uncountable, plural pickets)
- A stake driven into the ground.
- a picket fence
- (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.
- A tool in mountaineering that is driven into the snow and used as an anchor or to arrest falls.
- (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, published 2010, page 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.
- (sometimes figurative) A sentry.
- 1907 January, Harold Bindloss, chapter 26, in The Dust of Conflict, 1st Canadian edition, Toronto, Ont.: McLeod & Allen, →OCLC:
- Maccario, it was evident, did not care to take the risk of blundering upon a picket, and a man led them by twisting paths until at last the hacienda rose blackly before them.
- A protester positioned outside an office, workplace etc. during a strike (usually in plural); also the protest itself.
- Pickets normally endeavor to be non-violent.
- 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
- In the autumn there was a row at some cement works about the unskilled labour men. A union had just been started for them and all but a few joined. One of these blacklegs was laid for by a picket and knocked out of time.
- (card games, uncountable) The card game piquet.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]stake driven into the ground
|
type of punishment
|
soldiers placed forward of position
|
sentry — see sentry
protester outside a workplace during a strike
|
card game — see piquet
Verb
[edit]picket (third-person singular simple present pickets, present participle picketing, simple past and past participle picketed)
- (intransitive) To protest, organized by a labour union, typically in front of the location of employment.
- (transitive) To enclose or fortify with pickets or pointed stakes.
- (transitive) To tether to, or as if to, a picket.
- to picket a horse
- (transitive) To guard, as a camp or road, by an outlying picket.
- (obsolete, transitive) To torture by forcing to stand with one foot on a pointed stake.
Derived terms
[edit]- picketing (noun)
- unpicketed
German
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio: (file)
Verb
[edit]picket
Categories:
- English terms derived from French
- English 2-syllable words
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- Rhymes:English/ɪkɪt
- Rhymes:English/ɪkɪt/2 syllables
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