Noun

(en noun)

A period of time when a person occupies a position only conditionally and may easily be removed for poor performance

You'll be on probation for first six months. After that, if you work out, they'll hire you permanently.

A type of sentence where convicted criminals are allowed to continue living in the community but will automatically be sent to jail if they violate certain conditions

He got two years probation for robbery.

(archaic) The act of testing; proof

* 1661 , , page 20,

And I shall proceed to consider the testimony of Experience, when I shall have first advertis'd You, that if Men were as perfectly rational as 'tis to be wish'd they were, this sensible way of Probation would be as needless as 'tis wont to be imperfect.

* , lines 148-156,

And then it started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons. I have heard, / The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat / Awake the god of day; and, at his warning, / Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air / The extravagant and erring spirit hies / To his confine: and of the truth herein / This present object made probation .

Noun

(en noun)

The act of prosecuting a scheme or endeavor.

:

(lb) The institution of legal proceedings (particularly criminal) against a person.

*

*:Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability:it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.

(lb) The prosecuting party.

*{{quote-news, date=21 August 2012, first=Ed, last=Pilkington, newspaper=The Guardian

, title= Death penalty on trial: should Reggie Clemons live or die? , passage=The prosecution case was that the men forced the sisters to strip, threw their clothes over the bridge, then raped them and participated in forcing them to jump into the river to their deaths. As he walked off the bridge, Clemons was alleged to have said: "We threw them off. Let's go."}}