hostage
- 01 B2 Upper Intermediate
a person who is taken and kept by an enemy or criminal until they get what they want.
a person seized or held as security for the fulfilment of a condition or to compel a third party to act in a specific way.
Simple“The bank robbers took three people as hostage during the robbery.”
In context“The kidnappers released the hostage unharmed after their demands for safe passage out of the country were met by the authorities.”
- 02 C1 Advanced
a person or thing that is controlled or limited by a difficult situation.
a person or thing whose freedom of action is severely constrained by a specific risk or set of circumstances.
Simple“The prime minister was a hostage to his own party's extreme views.”
In context“The company became a hostage to its own success, unable to innovate because it feared alienating its existing customer base.”
“Her husband's mother was a spokesperson for the group that took dozens of Americans captive during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.”
“The war was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.”
From Middle English hostage, ostage, from Old French hostage, ostage. This, in turn, is either from Old French hoste (“host”) + -age (in which case the sense development is from taking someone into "lodging" to taking them into "captivity", to applying the term to a captive), or is from Vulgar Latin obsidāticum (“condition of being held captive”), from Latin obses (“hostage, captive”), with the initial h- added under the influence of hoste or another word. Displaced native Old English ġīsl.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.