a person who is captured and held prisoner by a person or group, and who may be injured or killed if people do not do what the person or group is asking:
Three children were taken hostage during the bank robbery. * He was held hostage for almost a year. * The government is negotiating the release of the hostages. * The hijackers kept the pilot as a hostage on board the plane.
IDIOMS
a hostage to fortune something that you have, or have promised to do, that could cause trouble or worry in the future
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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 hostage is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is hostage a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, hostage is tagged as noun.
Does hostage appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — hostage 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.
