sentence
Definitions
General English
- noun a series of words put together to make a complete statement, usually ending in a full stop
- verb to give someone an official legal punishment
Information & Library Science
- noun a group of words which is complete in itself, containing a subject and a verb
Law
- noun a legal punishment given by a court to a convicted person
Origin & History of “sentence”
‘Complete grammatical unit’ is a comparatively recent meaning of sentence, which only emerged in English in the 15th century. Its Latin ancestor sententia originally meant ‘feeling’, for it was a derivative of sentīre ‘feel’ (source also of English sense, sentiment, etc). It subsequently broadened out to ‘opinion, judgment’, which was the starting point for the use of English sentence for ‘judicial declaration of punishment’. Sententia also came to denote ‘meaning’, and hence ‘meaning expressed in words’ and ‘maxim’. The former lies behind the grammatical sense of English sentence, while the latter survives in the derived adjective sententious (15th c.).
