Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Picket for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Picket" — noun, pronounced /ˈpɪkɪt/, with the stress on "pick".
Narrator: A picket is a person or group stationed outside a workplace during a strike to discourage others from entering, and also a pointed wooden stake driven into the ground.
Narrator: In plain English, it is someone standing guard at a gate to make a protest visible, or a sharp post in a fence.
Narrator: It comes from the French word piquet, a small pointed stake, from piquer, meaning to prick or pierce.
Narrator: A common collocation is picket line, describing the boundary that striking workers form and that others are asked not to cross.
Narrator: It differs from protester, because a protester may gather anywhere, while a picket is posted at a specific entrance for a specific dispute.
Narrator: A second sense appears in picket fence, the neat row of pointed stakes that has become shorthand for comfortable suburban life.
Narrator: Employment law, trade unionism, journalism, military history and fencing and construction all rely on the word.
Narrator: So remember: a picket is a stake in the ground, whether made of wood or made of principle.
Speaker A: Why do we use the same word for a fence post and a striking worker?
Speaker B: Wonderful question! PICKET comes from the French piquet, a pointed stake, and soldiers posted as lookouts were called pickets because they stood like stakes in a line, and strikers inherited the name.
Speaker A: So the military sense came before the industrial one?
Speaker B: Exactly right, the guard duty sense came first, and nineteenth century trade unions borrowed it for workers standing watch at the gates.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The nurses formed a picket outside the hospital at dawn." That means they stood at the entrance during their strike. "He refused to cross the picket line." That means he would not go in to work out of solidarity. "She painted the picket fence white every summer." That means she repainted the row of pointed stakes.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Do not spell it picquet or confuse it with pocket, and remember the verb doubles the t, so we write picketing and picketed, never picketting.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Demonstrator is the broad cousin, striker is the near twin in a labour dispute, and sentry is the military alternative, yet picket keeps its sharp, stake-in-the-ground charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "picket" in AI prompts — useful for news summarisation tools and workforce scheduling software.
Speaker A: How would it apply to a news application?
Speaker B: Ask the model to extract structured facts from strike coverage.
Prompt: Read the attached news article and return a JSON object listing the employer, the union, the picket locations and the dates on which pickets were mounted.
Speaker A: What about internal operations tools?
Speaker B: Use it to plan staffing around disruption.
Prompt: Draft a contingency rota for a hospital ward assuming a picket is in place at the main entrance for three consecutive days, noting minimum safe staffing at each shift.
Speaker A: Could it help with documentation writing?
Speaker B: Yes, for policy text that must be precise and calm.
Prompt: Write a two hundred word internal policy paragraph explaining an employee's legal rights when a picket line is present at their workplace in the United Kingdom.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's use it for a content moderation classifier.
Prompt: Classify each of the following social media posts as peaceful picket activity, unrelated protest, or credible threat, and give a one sentence justification for every label.
Picket — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary