Word.ws English Dictionary

held fire

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

Meaning of hold fire

Verb

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

  1. (intransitive) To wait for an opportunity to shoot (with a firearm) at something or someone.
    Antonyms:
    open fire, fire
    1. (imperative, intransitive) Do not fire.
      • Hold fire!
  2. (intransitive) To delay taking action.
    • I have seen so much really credible evidence that the situation did not devolve the way we're being told it did. And then, another body of credible evidence that it was very different from what we're being told it is that I'm holding fire until I see the Warren Commission report on the...2025 September 23, Lawrence Wilkerson, Nima R Alkhorshid's Dialogue Works, YouTube
    Synonyms:
    hold up, hold on

Questions about held fire

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

Words near held fire in the dictionary

  1. held court
  2. held dear
  3. held down
  4. held down the fort
  5. held fast
  6. held fire
  7. held firm
  8. held for ransom
  9. held forth
  10. held good
  11. held hostage

Source and license

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