Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary - hostage

(hostages) Frequency: The word is one of the 1500 most common words in English. 1. A hostage is someone who has been captured by a person or organization and who may be killed or injured if people do not do what that person or organization demands. N-COUNT 2. If someone is taken hostage or is held hostage, they are captured and kept as a hostage. He was taken hostage while on his first foreign assignment as a television journalist. PHRASE: V inflects 3. If you say you are hostage to something, you mean that your freedom to take action is restricted by things that you cannot control. With the reduction in foreign investments, the government will be even more a hostage to the whims of the international oil price... N-VAR: N to n