LISTENER

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does listener mean? 

• LISTENER (noun)
  The noun LISTENER has 1 sense:

1. someone who listens attentively

  Familiarity information: LISTENER used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LISTENER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Someone who listens attentively

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

attender; auditor; hearer; listener

Hypernyms ("listener" is a kind of...):

beholder; observer; perceiver; percipient (a person who becomes aware (of things or events) through the senses)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "listener"):

eavesdropper (a secret listener to private conversations)

Holonyms ("listener" is a member of...):

audience (a gathering of spectators or listeners at a (usually public) performance)

Derivation:

listen (hear with intention)

listen (listen and pay attention)

 Context examples 

Susan was her only companion and listener on this, as on more common occasions.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

The listener's proverbial fate was not absolutely hers; she had heard no evil of herself, but she had heard a great deal of very painful import.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

"The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator."

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

You will find him an interested listener and no fool.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

He joined the listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Or when stories were told by the fire at night which made the flesh creep, the listeners sometimes said: “Oh, it makes us shudder!”

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

The listeners were amused; and Mrs. Weston gave Emma a look of particular meaning.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Barclay’s remarks were subdued and abrupt, so that none of them were audible to the listeners.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

More than half the time, the listeners were able to correctly determine the sentences being spoken by the computer.

(Scientists translate brain signals into speech sounds, National Institutes of Health)