flash crowd

Noun

flash crowd (plural flash crowds)

1. A large audience for a sporting event that is unexpected because of large numbers of game-day ticket sales rather than advance tickets.
   • Sure, you'll get trapped once in a while with a flash crowd. Like the first time Satchel Paige pitched in Cleveland. We thought we'd get 55,000, and we ended up with 78,000.1972, Bill Veeck, Edward Linn, Thirty tons a day, page 24
   • It was almost like a flash crowd at a sporting event. In all, we had more than 90 attendees, plus 32 instructors from around the country.1974, Potato Chipper - Volume 33, Issues 16-27, page 4
2. A crowd that forms suddenly.
   • The mall riot was the first successful riot in twenty years. “The police can get to a riot before it's a riot,” said McCord. “We call them flash crowds, and we watch for them.”1971, Larry Niven, Flash Crowd
   • From now on at the first word the police get of a flash crowd, of a mall riot—type crowd, the emergency switches are thrown at headquarters and they close down the displacement booths in the vicinity.2013, Andy Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter, →ISBN
3. (obsolete) The fashionable public.
   • To see the Hurst with tents encamp'd on, Look around Lawrence's at Hampton, Join the flash crowd (the horse being led Into the yard, and clean'd and fed); Talk to Dav. Hudson and Cy. Davis.1880, Henry Downes Miles, Pugilistica: Being One Hundred and Forty-four Years of the History of British Boxing
   • It was a low-grade, flash crowd with barrels of money and all as crooked as a switch-back railway, men and women both, so that one fine night when a second-story worker handed me a proposition for opening the back door I said, "All right, ...1912, Henry Cottrell Rowland, The Closing Net, page 2