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''sentinel'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260606185347-00-⌔

sentinel - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

sentinel (plural sentinels)

  • A sentry, watch, or guard.
    • ✤ 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.1
    • ✤ the sentinels who paced the ramparts2
    • ✤ *that princes do keep due sentinel *3
  • (obsolete) A private soldier.
    • ✤ “I will not permit the poorest centinel to be treated with injustice.”4
  • (computer science) A unique value recognised by a computer program for processing in a special way, or marking the end of a set of data.
    • ✤ The tag is a sentinel that suspends web-page processing and displays the subsequent text literally
    • ✤ […] a sentinel value that indicates a missing entry.5
  • A sentinel crab.
  • (attributive, medicine, epidemiology) A sign of a health risk (e.g. a disease, an adverse effect).
    • ✤ ***sentinel *animals can be used to explore endemic diseases.

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)

  • (transitive) To watch over as a guard.
    • ✤ He sentineled the north wall.
  • (transitive) To post a guard for.
    • ✤ He sentineled the north wall with just one man.
    • ✤ 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 […]6

Etymology

First attested in the 1570s from Middle French sentinelle (“watch or guard kept by a soldier”), from Old Italian sentinella, probably from sentina +‎ -ella, from sentire (“perceive, watch, hear”), from sentiō (“feel, perceive by the senses”). See also sense, sentient.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈsɛn.tɪ.nəl/
  • Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter XII, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1625, Francis[Bacon], “Of Empire”, in The Essayes […], 3rd edition, London: […] Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, →OCLC: ↩

  4. 1789, John Moore, Zeluco, Valancourt, published 2008, page 33: ↩

  5. 2016, Jake VanderPlas, Python Data Science Handbook, page 120: ↩

  6. 1873, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, volume 46, page 562: ↩

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