Word.ws English Dictionary

hang onto

hang onto verb: to keep.

Verb

hang onto (third-person singular simple present hangs onto, present participle hanging onto, simple past and past participle hung onto)

  1. to keep
    • They hang onto all these kinds of thing, and insist that only what offers contact and touch is a thing that is.2005, Plato, translated by Lesley Brown, Sophist, page 246b

Forms of hang onto

third-person singular presenthangs onto
present participlehanging onto
past participlehung onto
pasthung onto

Questions about hang onto

What does hang onto mean?
Hang onto means to keep.
What part of speech is hang onto?
Hang onto is a verb.
What is the past tense of hang onto?
The past tense of hang onto is hung onto.

Words near hang onto in the dictionary

  1. hang one on
  2. hang one's hat
  3. hang one's hat on
  4. hang one's head
  5. hang one's lip
  6. hang onto
  7. hang onto your hat
  8. hang out
  9. hang out one's shingle
  10. hang out to dry
  11. hang over

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hang onto (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.

Last updated:

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