Word.ws English Dictionary

held firm

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

Meaning of hold firm

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To keep to a conviction, practice, etc., unwaveringly.
    • .... the depressed person's emotional agony had so completely overwhelmed her... that whenever a member of her Support System finally said that she was dreadfully sorry but she absolutely had to get off the telephone, the primal instinct for sheer emotional survival now drove the depressed person...1998 January, David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”, in Harpers Magazine, page 63

Questions about held firm

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

Words near held firm in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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