warder

Etymology

noun

1. A guard, especially in a prison.
   1885, Richard Francis Burton (translator), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5, 368ᵗʰ Night, p. 26, So the guards carried him to the jail, thinking to lay him by the heels there for the night; but, when the warders saw his beauty and loveliness, they could not find it in their hearts to imprison him: they made him sit with them without the walls; and, when food came to them, he ate with them what sufficed him.
   Nobody else spoke, but they noticed the long stripes on Okonkwo’s back where the warder’s whip had cut into his flesh. 1958, Chinua Achebe, chapter 24, in Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann
2. (archaic) A truncheon or staff carried by a king or commander, used to signal commands.
   1595, Samuel Daniel, Civil Wars, in The Poetical Works of Mr. Samuel Daniel, Volume II, London: R. Gosling, 1718, Book I, stanza 62, p. 25, When, lo! the king chang’d suddenly his Mind, Casts down his Warder to arrest them there;
3. One who or that which wards or repels.
   The conspicuous position thus accorded to the cat as a warder-off of evil fortune seems oddly paralleled, though not imitated, by the place accorded to the same animal in popular European folklore. 1876, The China Review, Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East, page 79