picket vs sentinel

picket

noun
  • A sentry. 

  • A type of punishment by which an offender had to rest his or her entire body weight on the top of a small stake. 

  • 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. 

  • A protester positioned outside an office, workplace etc. during a strike (usually in plural); also the protest itself. 

  • The card game piquet. 

  • A stake driven into the ground. 

  • A tool in mountaineering that is driven into the snow and used as an anchor or to arrest falls. 

verb
  • To enclose or fortify with pickets or pointed stakes. 

  • To tether to, or as if to, a picket. 

  • To guard, as a camp or road, by an outlying picket. 

  • To protest, organized by a labour union, typically in front of the location of employment. 

sentinel

noun
  • A sentry, watch, or guard. 

  • A unique string of characters recognised by a computer program for processing in a special way; a keyword. 

  • A sentinel crab. 

  • A sign of a health risk (e.g. a disease, an adverse effect). 

verb
  • To post as guard. 

  • To post a guard for. 

  • To watch over as a guard. 

How often have the words picket and sentinel occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )