Word.ws English Dictionary

held to account

held to account is the simple past and past participle of hold to account.

Meaning of hold to account

Verb

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

  1. (transitive) To require a person to explain or to accept responsibility for his or her actions; to blame or punish someone for what has occurred.
    • [W]hatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account.1906, Richard Harding Davis, chapter 1, in Soldiers of Fortune
    Synonyms:
    call to account, hold accountable, hold responsible, take to task

Questions about held to account

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

Words near held to account in the dictionary

  1. held the ring
  2. held the road
  3. held the stage
  4. held tight
  5. held to
  6. held to account
  7. held to ransom
  8. held together
  9. held true
  10. held up
  11. held up a mirror to

Source and license

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