Word.ws English Dictionary

held dear

held dear is the simple past and past participle of hold dear.

Meaning of hold dear

Verb

hold dear (third-person singular simple present holds dear, present participle holding dear, simple past and past participle held dear)

  1. (transitive) To value highly; to care about greatly.
    • Here, we see that climate denialism/skepticism might be informed by a certain version of anti-elitism—ironically enough, a value that many progressives hold dear.2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 44

Questions about held dear

What is held dear the simple past and past participle of?
Held dear is the simple past and past participle of hold dear.

Words near held dear in the dictionary

  1. held ball
  2. held balls
  3. held by the button
  4. held cheap
  5. held court
  6. held dear
  7. held down
  8. held down the fort
  9. held fast
  10. held fire
  11. held firm

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: held dear (page history and authors); hold dear (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: “held dear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/held_dear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.