Word.ws English Dictionary

held onto

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

Meaning of hold onto

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To manage to keep something.
    • Desperate to hold onto power, Pervez Musharraf has discarded Pakistan's constitutional framework and declared a state of emergency.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see hold, onto.

Questions about held onto

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

Words near held onto in the dictionary

  1. held one's pee
  2. held one's piss
  3. held one's tongue
  4. held one's water
  5. held oneself together
  6. held onto
  7. held out
  8. held over
  9. held over someone's head
  10. held ransom
  11. held short

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: held onto (page history and authors); hold 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.

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