Sentry

How to spell sentry

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sentry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sentry mean?

1. nounA soldier or guard stationed to keep watch and control access to a place.

Sentry in a sentence

• A sentry stood at the palace gate throughout the night.

• The sentry checked every visitor's pass before opening the barrier.

Where does sentry come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Sentry is a word of genuinely uncertain origin, and good dictionaries are honest about that. It appears in English around the 1610s meaning a soldier set to keep watch, and the most widely accepted idea is that it is a clipped form of 'sentinel', which English took from the Italian sentinella, a watchman. A rival theory connects it to an older English word 'centry', itself a worn-down form of 'sanctuary', on the notion of a place of refuge or a watch kept over such a place; the link is plausible but never proven. Either way the spelling settled on the -ry ending, which is why writers sometimes wrongly reach for 'century' or add an extra vowel. Today the word covers both the guard who stands watch and, in compounds like 'sentry box', the post itself.

How the word is built

• sentry (a single, unanalysable word; probably a shortening of sentinel, with no separable prefix or suffix)