1 kept as a prisoner or in an enclosed space; unable to escape:
captive animals * They were taken captive by masked gunmen. * captive breeding (= the catching and breeding of wild animals)
2 [onlybeforenoun] not free to leave a particular place or to choose what you want do to:
A salesman loves to have a captive audience (= listening because they have no choice).
noun a person who is kept as a prisoner, especially in a war:
Talks have persuaded the terrorists to set the captives free.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for captive is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is captive a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, captive is tagged as adjective.
Does captive appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — captive appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
