Word.ws English Dictionary

breathhold

breathhold noun: the act of holding breath.

Noun

breathhold (plural breathholds)

  1. (especially, uncommon) The act of holding breath.
    • The spatial resolution and signal-to-noise in coronary MRA can be further improved by either switching to nonbreathhold techniques (thus eliminating some of the time constraints needed for breathhold techniques) or by using better coil designs[.]2006, Andre J. Duerinckx, Coronary Magnetic Resonance Angiography, →ISBN, page 44
  2. (especially, uncommon) An instance of holding breath.
    • Acquisition times can be long and prevent imaging within the time span of a single breathhold.2012, Mark Creager, Joseph Loscalzo, Joshua A. Beckman, Vascular Medicine: A Companion to Braunwald's Heart Disease, →ISBN

Verb

breathhold (third-person singular simple present breathholds, present participle breathholding, simple past and past participle breathheld)

  1. (uncommon) To hold one's breath.
    • If the patient was in a condition to breathold, this was done; however, due to the general condition of many of the patients studied, this was not always attempted.1995, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England

Forms of breathhold

Noun
pluralbreathholds
Verb
third-person singular presentbreathholds
present participlebreathholding
past participlebreathheld
pastbreathheld

Origin of breathhold

From breath + hold.

Questions about breathhold

What does breathhold mean?
Breathhold means the act of holding breath.
What part of speech is breathhold?
Breathhold can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of breathhold?
The plural of breathhold is breathholds.

Words near breathhold in the dictionary

  1. breathes upon
  2. breathest
  3. breatheth
  4. breathful
  5. breathfuls
  6. breathhold
  7. breathholding
  8. breathholds
  9. breathier
  10. breathiest
  11. breathily

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breathhold (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “breathhold.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breathhold. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.