to keep someone hooked
- phrasal verb
- Informal
- You both have awesome on-screen personalities that kept me hooked (even if you said vrogger).
- keeps viewers hooked
Examples
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I suppose saying what your audience wants to hear is more valuable for keeping 'em hooked, though—the guy does have subscriptions to keep selling, after all.
Blog text (1) -
I have been waiting for a word game to come along to sweep me off my feet, to hook me and to keep me hooked.
Blog text (16) -
I love Diana; she tells a hell of a story and keeps you hooked.
Blog text (10) -
I felt that way through the first series, but at least the plotting and most of the characters were enough to keep me hooked.
Blog text (3) -
The plot is good enough to keep you hooked from beginning to end, and Denzel Washington proves
Blog text (27) -
From page one, Beck McDowell reels you in and keeps you hooked for the next 200 pages.
Blog text (28) -
But the Salieri that he and Gieleta have created lacks a bravura dynamism that other actors have used to keep the audience hooked: a sardonic humor, an underlying anger; there are many possibilities.
Blog text (1) -
Producers of the sex-and-scandal drama, which returned to TV screens this week, kept viewers hooked in 1980 with a season-ending plot in which the backstabbing oil baron was gunned down by a mystery assailant.
Blog text (4) -
This book has such an intriguing plot that it keeps you hooked from the first page to the last.
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The suspenseful twists in the film always keep the audience hooked until the very end.
Synonyms
To attract and hold someone's strong interest or attention
To keep someone's attention
To hold someone's full attention because something is very interesting or surprising
So interested that you cannot stop watching or listening
To hold someone's full attention by being very interesting
To attract and keep people's interest
Make someone feel interested or amused for a while
Hold someone's full attention so they cannot think of anything else
Antonyms
How Engaging
Surface Forms
Morphology
The adjective 'hooked' conveys being strongly interested or addicted, and 'keep' indicates maintaining a state; combining them yields 'maintain someone in a hooked/interested state'. This is a regular 'keep + adjective' compositional pattern (keep someone + [state]) that a B1 learner who knows the constituents can readily infer.
Etymology
Keep someone hooked may come from fishing: when a fish bites the bait the hook holds it so the fish can't get away. That's why the phrase now means 'to keep someone's interest'.