audience [LME] When people go to the theatre they generally talk about going to ‘see’ a play, but in former times the usual verb was ‘hear’. In keeping with this idea, the oldest meaning of audience is ‘hearing, attention to what is spoken’. Audience is based on the Latin word audire ‘to hear’ also found in audible [LME], ‘able to be heard’. An auditorium [E17th], originally a Latin word, was a place for hearing something. Before it meant a trial performance of an actor or singer, audition [L16th] was the act of hearing or listening. And an audit [LME] was originally a hearing, in particular a judicial hearing of some kind—it was later used as the term for the reading out of a set of accounts, hence the modern meaning.