Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary - sentence

 I. noun  Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin sententia feeling, opinion, from *sentent-, *sentens, irregular present participle of sentire to feel — more at sense  Date: 14th century  1. obsolete opinion; especially a conclusion given on request or reached after deliberation  2.  a. judgment 2a; specifically one formally pronounced by a court or judge in a criminal proceeding and specifying the punishment to be inflicted upon the convict  b. the punishment so imposed serve out a ~  3. archaic maxim, saw  4.  a. a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses  b. a mathematical or logical statement (as an equation or a proposition) in words or symbols  5. period 2b  II. transitive verb  (~d; sentencing)  Date: 1592  1. to impose a ~ on  2. to cause to suffer something ~d these most primitive cultures to extinction — E. W. Count