audient

adj

1. (not-comparable)Listening, paying attention.

   “The prosochist is that person whom the noun itself designates by means of an audient intonation, an audient indication, or an audient comma, as the paricular individual to whose notice the par-e-theme presents the different objects mntioned, or implied, in the sentence; as, Master, I have brought unto thee my son. (Master.)”

   “And, as we sate, we felt the old earth spin, / And all the starry turbulence of worlds / Swing round us in their audient circles, till / If that same golden moon were overhead / Or if beneath our feet, we did not know.”

   “Nyarlathotep … the crawling chaos … I am the last … I will tell the audient void …”

noun

1. (uncommon)A hearer; a member of an audience.

   “The audients of her ſad ſtorie, felt great motions both of pitie and admiration for her miſfortunes: […]”

   “Let me not ſee you act now, / In your Scholaſticke way, you brought to towne wi'yee, / With ſee ſaw ſacke a downe, like a Sawyer; / Nor in a Comicke Scene, play Hercules furens, / Tearing your throat to ſplit the Audients eares.”

   “In each case, an individual author confronts an individual responder, an ‘audient’, with a single artistic construct. (Even in co-written books, there is a unified authorship, and even in communal play-going, the experience involves a discrete work presented in a discrete form to a discrete ‘audient’.)”

   “Fifty-five minutes later, the audience demanded encores and were rewarded with a little more Mario and the mellow tones of Jimmy Smith and Reuben Wilson. ‘I loved it’, said one audient, as she filed out of the auditorium at the end of the show. ‘Where did you get the idea?’”

2. (obsolete, specifically)A catechumen (“convert to Christianity under instruction before baptism”) in the early Christian Church.

   “This aforesaid doctor [John Chrysostom] in divers places of his writings both sharply and grievously reproveth his audients for their slack coming unto the Lord's table, and exhorteth them many times in the year, yea, daily (if they have pure minds) to come unto the holy communion.”

   “[…] And they were called Catechumeni, who were vnder their inſtruction, and had not yet profited ſo farre, that they might be admitted to receiue the Sacraments. S. Ciprian calleth theſe Audientes, that is, hearers, and the Catechiſt, Doctorem Audientium, that is, the teacher of the hearers.”