captive audience

1. Listeners or onlookers who have no choice but to attend. For example, It's a required course and, knowing he has a captive audience, the professor rambles on endlessly. This expression, first recorded in 1902, uses captive in the sense of “unable to escape.”

Example Sentences

In the hospital newborns are a captive audience, so it’s easier to get them there than waiting for a later visit, which some may miss.

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They wanted a captive audience for long enough to lay out their case for change.

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Mr Coatsworth said these shops "benefit from a captive audience allowing the company to generate strong margins".

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But, when Deborah makes the ceremony all about her, first having Ava write her speech, and then testing out some of her roast material to her captive audience, DJ comes to the realization that her mother has an insatiable addiction to attention, and that’s why she can never be the mom she always wanted her to be.

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Last November, Wilcox and a majority of the board voted to bar Amazon from holding mandatory "captive audience meetings" designed to threaten or persuade voters against forming a union.

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