Audience

1. a. An auditory; an assembly of hearers. Also applied by authors to their readers.
2. a. The act of hearing; attention to sounds.
3. a. Admittance to a hearing; a formal interview, esp. with a sovereign or the head of a government, for conference or the transaction of business.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.