hostages
- 1Plural of hostage.
Negotiators worked through the night to secure the release of the hostages.
The armed group threatened to harm the hostages unless their demands were met.
Note
A regular plural, simply hostage plus -s, and it carries every meaning of the singular. In older diplomacy, hostages were people handed over as pledges that a treaty would be kept. Today they are more often people seized to force a demand. The plural usually appears as the object of verbs of taking, exchanging and releasing: to take, trade or free hostages.
hostages is a form of hostage
hostage, noun: A person seized and held to force another party to act, or refrain from acting, under threat of harm to the captive. Full entry
- Forms
- hostagehostages plural
- Spelling
- hostage → hostages: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /ɪz/, an extra syllable.
Use it in a sentence
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