Other forms: protests, protested, protesting
A protest is people coming out in public to say that something is wrong. A few hundred in the square with placards, a march down a road closed for the afternoon, a line of workers chanting outside a factory gate.
Protest is a verb too, and the stress moves when the job changes: the noun is PRO-test, the verb is pro-TEST. British English puts a preposition after the verb — you protest against a decision, you protest about the noise — while Americans go straight at it and protest the decision. There is a second verb sense that has nothing to do with crowds: to protest your innocence is to insist on it, loudly and repeatedly, to people who have stopped listening. The set phrases are worth learning whole: a protest march, a protest vote, a letter of protest, and doing something under protest, which means doing it while making sure everybody knows you object.
1nounprotestA public show of anger at something people think is wrong.~86%
“The protest filled the square by mid-morning.”
2verbspeechTo say publicly and strongly that something is wrong.~12%
“Thousands protested against the rise in fees.”
3verbstateTo state something firmly when you are being doubted.~2%
“He protested his innocence all the way to the cells.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 148 sentences found in the wild and placed 146 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: demonstration
Latin testis meant a witness, and prōtestor was to declare a thing out in front of them, where it counted. That is why you can still protest your innocence: the older sense of the word is not to object but to testify — to say it in the open, so that it is on the record.
Proto-Indo-European
*per-
Latin
prōtestor
Old French
protester
English, today
protest
Built from
From the Middle English - verb protesten, from Old French protester, from Latin prōtestor, from prō + testor, from testis (“witness”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA