“Audience” or “spectators”?

In their literal senses:

• An audience listens
• Spectators watch

That’s because

• “Audience” comes from the Latin verb: “audire”, meaning to hear
• “Spectator” comes from the Latin verb “spectare”, meaning to watch

In normal use:

• Concerts, plays, ballets, operas, tv programmes and other performances have an audience
• Football, hockey, basketball matches and other sporting events have spectators

It might help to think that:

• When I watch a play, television programme or ballet I want to hear as well as see
• When I watch a football or basketball match I want to see – I’m not really interested in what the players are saying

But, as always, there are exceptions and oddities:

• If I have an appointment with a well-known person I might say I have “an audience” with that person. People talk, for example, about having an audience with the Pope.
• When writers write they think about their “audience” – the people who might read what they have written. It’s another word for readers. Perhaps it comes from the days when most people couldn’t read – but they might listen to someone else reading.
• “Audience” is singular. “Spectators” is plural.
• So, one person in a group of spectators is a spectator. One person in an audience is an audience member.
• “Spectator” is also used for someone who witnesses something bus doesn’t actually take part. If I go to a football match I’m not actually taking part, of course. But if I’m at a meeting and listen to everybody else without saying anything myself, someone might say I’m “just a spectator”, meaning it as a criticism. A football fan might say: “Paul Pogba did nothing all game. He was just a spectator”.
• Some sports (football, perhaps) are regarded as particularly good to watch. They can be called “a spectator sport”. Others (for example, chess) are regarded as not very good to watch. So someone might say “chess is not a spectator sport”.
• Sometimes people talk about “audience share”. So if 60% of people who were watching television at 9.00 pm yesterday were watching Channel 1, we might say that Channel 1 had an audience share of 60%.
• One dictionary definition of audience is “… the group of spectators at a public event”.
• One dictionary definition of spectator is “… a member of an audience”.

Related words:

• spectacle, spectacular, spectrum, spectrography
• audio, audible, audiobook, audiodisk, audiologist