Word.ws English Dictionary

centinel

centinel is the obsolete spelling of sentinel.

Meaning of sentinel

Noun

sentinel (plural sentinels)

  1. A sentry, watch, or guard.
    • They promised faithfully to bear their confinement with patience, and were very thankful that they had such good usage as to have provisions and light left them; for Friday gave them candles (such as we made ourselves) for their comfort; and they did not know but that he stood sentinel over them at...1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC
  2. (obsolete) A private soldier.
    • “I will not permit the poorest centinel to be treated with injustice.”1789, John Moore, Zeluco, Valancourt, published 2008, page 33
  3. A unique value recognised by a computer program for processing in a special way, or marking the end of a set of data.
    • The <xmp> tag is a sentinel that suspends web-page processing and displays the subsequent text literally
  4. A sentinel crab.
  5. (attributive) A sign of a health risk (e.g. a disease, an adverse effect).
    • sentinel animals can be used to explore endemic diseases.

See all 11 meanings of sentinel

Forms of centinel

pluralcentinels

Questions about centinel

What is centinel the obsolete spelling of?
Centinel is the obsolete spelling of sentinel.

Words near centinel in the dictionary

  1. centimoles
  2. centimorgan
  3. centimorgans
  4. centimos
  5. centims
  6. centinel
  7. centinell
  8. centinells
  9. centinels
  10. centinewton
  11. centinewtons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: centinel (page history and authors); sentinel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “centinel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/centinel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.