Picket vs Picked - What's the difference?

As verbs the difference between picket and picked

is that picket is to protest, organized by a labour union, typically in front of the location of employment while picked is past tense of pick.

As a noun picket

is a stake driven into the ground.

As an adjective picked is

pointed; sharp.

picket

English

Noun

(en noun)

A stake driven into the ground.

(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) Soldiers or troops placed on a line forward of a position to warn against an enemy advance. It can also refer to any unit (for example, an aircraft or ship) performing a similar function.

* 1990 , (Peter Hopkirk), The Great Game , Folio Society 2010, p. 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.

A sentry. Can be used figuratively.

* {{quote-book, year=1907, author=

, chapter=26, title= The Dust of Conflict , passage=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.

* , chapter=22

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=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) The card game piquet.

Verb

(en verb)

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

To enclose or fortify with pickets or pointed stakes.

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

to picket a horse

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

(obsolete) To torture by forcing to stand with one foot on a pointed stake.

Derived terms

* picket line * picketing * unpicketed ----

picked

English

Verb

(head)

(pick)

Adjective

(en adjective)

(obsolete) pointed; sharp

* Chapman

Picked and polished.

* Mortimer

Let the stake be made picked at the top.

(zoology, of fishes) Having a pike or spine on the back.

the picked dogfish

(obsolete) fine; spruce; smart; precise; dainty

* 1590 , , V. i. 13:

He is too / picked , too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, / too peregrinate, as I may call it.

* 1596 , , I. i. 193:

Why then I suck my teeth and catechize / My picked man of countries:

(Webster 1913)