the.com/attendee

means A person who shows up to an event, meeting, or conference — physically there, mentally negotiable.

from Built from 'attend,' which traces back through French to Latin 'attendere' — 'ad-' (toward) plus 'tendere' (to stretch). To attend something originally meant to stretch your mind toward it, to pay heed. The '-ee' suffix, borrowed from legal French (as in 'employee' or 'payee'), marks the person on the receiving end of an action rather than the one doing it — so an attendee is, grammatically, someone attended-to-the-event-by-circumstance rather than an active 'attender.' Fittingly, the word's own bones admit that the stretching-toward-attention part is optional.