Word.ws English Dictionary

hostaged

hostaged is the simple past and past participle of hostage.

Meaning of hostage

Verb

hostage (third-person singular simple present hostages, present participle hostaging, simple past and past participle hostaged)

  1. (nonstandard, possibly) To give (someone or something) as a hostage to (someone or something else).
    • […] in voting the prolongation of the military budget on a war estimate for a span of three years, contemplates, it is said, a speedy reoccupation of the six departments of France which were hostaged to the Germans at the termination of the war.2003, Shirley Mask Connolly, Kashubia to Canada: Crossing on the Agda : an Emigration Story, page 16, quoting some earlier work
  2. (nonstandard, possibly) To hold (someone or something) hostage, especially in a way that constrains or controls the person or thing held, or in order to exchange for something else.
    • Flexibility of hours is now hostaged to availability of work. Yet, despite these obvious drawbacks the appeal to nurses of freelancing seems to live on. The chief advantage of agency work is the lack of commitment or not being bound by contract ...1983, Nursing Mirror

See all 7 meanings of hostage

Questions about hostaged

What is hostaged the simple past and past participle of?
Hostaged is the simple past and past participle of hostage.

Words near hostaged in the dictionary

  1. hostage taker
  2. hostage takers
  3. hostage to fortune
  4. hostage-taker
  5. hostage-takers
  6. hostaged
  7. hostagehood
  8. hostager
  9. hostagers
  10. hostages
  11. hostages to fortune

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hostaged (page history and authors); hostage (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hostaged.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hostaged. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.