Word.ws English Dictionary

closely held

closely held adjective: of a corporation or other business, owned by a small number of people, and not having shares of ownership sold via a stock exchange or other public market.

Adjective

closely held (not comparable)

  1. Of a corporation or other business, owned by a small number of people, and not having shares of ownership sold via a stock exchange or other public market.
    • Near-synonym: privately held (often hypernymous)
    • To reach Africa’s largest oil refinery, you must drive along a new six-lane highway that snakes its way through the swampland of Nigeria’s Atlantic shoreline. […] The refinery operates as a kind of city-state. It has its own jetty and breakwater to ensure the safe delivery of high-tech equipment...2025 August 20, Peter Martin, Nduka Orjinmo, Paul Burkhardt, “Africa’s Richest Person Wants to Dominate Oil Refining, Too. Will Aliko Dangote help enrich impoverished Nigeria, or just himself?”, in...
    Synonyms:
    privately held
    Antonyms:
    publicly held

Synonyms of closely held

Antonyms

Questions about closely held

What does closely held mean?
Closely held means of a corporation or other business, owned by a small number of people, and not having shares of ownership sold via a stock exchange or other public market.
What part of speech is closely held?
Closely held is an adjective.

Words near closely held in the dictionary

  1. closeish
  2. closelier
  3. closeliest
  4. closelipped
  5. closely
  6. closely held
  7. closeminded
  8. closemindedly
  9. closemindedness
  10. closemouth
  11. closemouthed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: closely held (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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