picket

noun

• 1a person or group of people who stand outside a workplace or other venue as a protest or to try to persuade others not to enter during a strike: forty pickets were arrested
• a blockade of a workplace or other venue staged by a picket: the workers walked out, mounting mass pickets at the factory gates

• 2 (also picquet) a soldier or small group of soldiers performing a particular duty, especially one sent out to watch for the enemy: when would this headlong advance run into the enemy pickets? a picket of soldiers fired a volley over the coffin

• 3 [usually as modifier] a pointed wooden stake driven into the ground, typically to form a fence or to tether a horse: a cedar-picket stockade

verb (pickets, picketing, picketed)

• act as a picket outside (a workplace or other venue):strikers picketed the newspaper’s main building