# vidience
## English
### Etymology

From Latin vidēre (“to see”), by analogy with audience from Latin audīre (“to hear”).

### Noun

vidience (plural vidiences)
* (rare) A group of observers.
** [1867, Albert D[eane] Richardson, chapter XXX, in Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean. […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company. […], page 358:During the season of my second visit, the receipts of Brigham’s theater averaged eight hundred dollars per night; and one evening they reached thirteen hundred dollars. Mrs. Julia Dean Cooper was filling a long star engagement at two hundred dollars per night. At first she found the audiences, or as Gail Hamilton would call them, the vidiences, curiously fresh and inexperienced.]
** 1894, Kate Sanborn, “Help!”, in Abandoning an Adopted Farm, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton and Company, page 71:There was not even a referee, no seconds, no bottle-holder—barring one of the combatants—no reporters, no audience, not even a vidience.
** 1912 September, Raymond L. Schrock, “Reflections of the Critic”, in The Photoplay Magazine, volume III, number 2, Chicago, Ill.: A. H. McLaughlin, page 86, column 2:It is very easy to see what a help to a vidience the caste can be, especially in some very heavy drama or costume play, which requires close attention to understand.
** [1914 February, Petra T. Fandrem, “Exchanges”, in Silent Worker, volume XXVI, number 5, Trenton, N.J., page 97, column 1:Mr. A. J. Eickhoff has coined us a new word, Vidience, designating a body of persons who “hear” by means of sight.]
** 1925 August, William Lyon Phelps, “As I Like It”, in Scribner’s Magazine, volume LXXVIII, number 2, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, page 212:Years ago I saw Mr. Cohan in an American-flag-song-and-dance-show called “The Yankee Prince.” I found it a colossal bore. However, the house was jammed to the last inch, and apparently the audience or vidience loved it. […] With reference to the word vidience, which, at the suggestion of Mr. John M. Shedd, I advocated in a recent number of this magazine, I am surprised to learn from the Chicago News of April 29 that “the word optience for a movie assemblage is already in general use, in the Middle West at least.” […] R. H. Pitt, editor of The Religious Herald, Richmond, Va., claims priority over Mr. John M. Shedd for the coinage of the word vidience.
** 1936 June 1, “Artists Who Think”, in The Art Digest, volume X, number 17, New York, N.Y.: The Art Digest, Inc., page 39, column 2:Among the related subjects discussed were: the economic struggle of the artist for survival in a world crisis; the fight against censorship; the repression of the Negro; the freedom enjoyed by artists in the Soviet Union; the boycott of the Nazi Olympic art exhibitions; organization of artists; the social basis of art; race and art; the artist in search of a vidience; ways to reach wider publics; art museums and the living artist; present-day tendencies in American art; art in Italy and Germany under fascism; and permanent federal art projects.
** 1936 July 1, “Gruskin Arranges Modern Pittsburgh Shows”, in The Art Digest, volume X, number 18, New York, N.Y.: The Art Digest, Inc., page 30, column 3:“The County Fair,” reproduced herewith, is a recent canvas by Waldo Peirce in the Gillespie Galleries display. Peirce is known to Pittsburgh vidiences through his entries at the Carnegie Internationals.
** 1945 September 1, “Book Reviews”, in Electrical World, volume 124, number 9, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., Inc., page 164:Television is a post-war load potentiality for the electric utilities. Some of potentiality rests on the capacity of prospective “vidiences” to absorb the sets and some depends on the type of programs offered and how well they are organized and supervised.
** 1963 March 1, “The 10 Biggest Mistakes Speakers Make—No. 7”, in Sales Management, volume 90, number 5, New York, N.Y., page 54, column 2:When we read a transcribed recording of a speech – such as the one above – we realize the basic difference between an audience and a “vidience.” The former must depend entirely upon fleeting sounds. The latter can turn back the pages to refresh its memory. Thus, the audience needs much more linking and restatement than the “vidience.”
** [1975, Ear Magazine, volumes 1–2:[…] an audience (dig the word audience. all we do is look but who ever heard of a vidience).]
** [1985, William H[ardman] Poteat, Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 284:And a skillful speaker of this gestural language who accompanies his visible speech with conventional spoken English for those in the audience who hear (are the deaf an audience—or are they rather a vidience?) is not performing a word by word translation of the one into the other.]
** [1992, Culture & Tradition, volume 15, page 92:The "audience" as a passive receiver of information, might be better described if that term is replaced by the notion of a "vidience" (Beardsley 4), which does not necessarily hearken us back to preliterate times, and gives a greater sense, once again, of the multisensory interactive nature of “communication” -beyond the religious connotations.]
** [1993, Murray Grigor, “Space in Time: Filming Architecture”, in the Program for Art on Film, compiler, Architecture on Screen: Films and Videos on Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Historic Preservation, City and Regional Planning, New York, N.Y., →ISBN, page xxxi:In the final analysis, film and television are primarily expected to tell stories. Audiences (or “vidiences”) want to be engaged by some form of narrative.]