flash crowd

flash crowd (plural flash crowds)

1. Alternative form of flashcrowd
   • 2006, Yannis Manolopoulos, Jaroslav Pokorný, Timos Sellis, Advances in Databases and Information Systems, →ISBN:

     As mentioned in the Introduction, it is crucial to enhance content delivery during flash crowd events.

2. A large audience for a sporting event that is unexpected because of large numbers of game-day ticket sales rather than advance tickets.
   • 1972, Bill Veeck, Edward Linn, Thirty tons a day, page 24:

     Sure, you'll get trapped once in a while with a flash crowd. Like the first time Satchel Paige pitched in Cleveland. We thought we'd get 55,000, and we ended up with 78,000.

   • 1974, Potato Chipper - Volume 33, Issues 16-27, page 4:

     It was almost like a flash crowd at a sporting event. In all, we had more than 90 attendees, plus 32 instructors from around the country.

   • 2006, Joe Castiglione, Broadcast Rites and Sites: I Saw It on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox, →ISBN:

     When they did, they were flash crowds-—not much advance tickets, but lots of game-day sales.

3. A crowd that forms suddenly.
   • 1971, Larry Niven, Flash Crowd:

     The mall riot was the first successful riot in twenty years. “The police can get to a riot before it's a riot,” said McCord. “We call them flash crowds, and we watch for them.”

   • 2013, Andy Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter, →ISBN:

     From now on at the first word the police get of a flash crowd, of a mall riot—type crowd, the emergency switches are thrown at headquarters and they close down the displacement booths in the vicinity.

   • 2013, Ruth A. Tucker, The Biographical Bible, →ISBN:

     Indeed, without any form of social media other than word of mouth, flash crowds materialize almost spontaneously.

   • 2014, Tabrik C, Prisoner, Jailor, Prime Minister, →ISBN:

     They had real power now, commanding flash crowds to appear anywhere on issues that touched them.

4. Alternative form of flash mob
   • 2009, Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together, →ISBN:

     Later flash crowds involved getting dozens of people to perch on a stone ledge in Central Park all making bird noises, a “Zombie walk” in San Francisco, and a silent dance party at London's Victoria Station.

   • 2014, George Ritzer, Essentials of Sociology, →ISBN, page 455:

     A new type is the flash crowd (or flash mob). Flash crowds might gather, for example, to engage in a pillow fight.

5. (obsolete) The fashionable public.
   • 1880, Henry Downes Miles, Pugilistica: Being One Hundred and Forty-four Years of the History of British Boxing:

     To see the Hurst with tents encamp'd on, Look around Lawrence's at Hampton, Join the flash crowd (the horse being led Into the yard, and clean'd and fed); Talk to Dav. Hudson and Cy. Davis.

   • 1912, Henry Cottrell Rowland, The Closing Net, page 2:

     It was a low-grade, flash crowd with barrels of money and all as crooked as a switch-back railway, men and women both, so that one fine night when a second-story worker handed me a proposition for opening the back door I said, "All right, ...

   • 1910, F. Marion Crawford, The Primadonna, →ISBN:

     There is a legend about each; she is either an angel of purity and light, or a beautiful monster of iniquity; she has turned the heads of kings—'kings' in a vaguely royal plural— completely round on their shoulders, or she has built out of her earnings a hospital for crippled children; the watery-sentimental eye of the flash crowd in its cups sees in her a Phryne, a Mrs. Fry, or a Saint Cecilia.