Word.ws English Dictionary

hold-ups

hold-ups is the plural of hold-up.

Meaning of hold-up

Noun

hold-up (plural hold-ups)

  1. (colloquial) A delay or wait.
    • What is the hold-up?
  2. (slang) A robbery at gunpoint.
    • This is a hold-up! Give us all your money.
  3. The holding back of a card that could win a trick in order to use it later.
    • This was another hand on which a holdup caused declarer to lose control and to go down in a sensational way: […]1974, Terence Reese, Master Play in Contract Bridge, page 75
  4. (in plural) Women's stockings designed to be worn without suspenders.
  5. The inventory of nuclear material within a separation plant.
    • And to the left is a portable gamma counter that tells us the holdup of plutonium recovery facilities.1978, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services. Intelligence and Military Application of Nuclear Energy Subcommittee, Hearings on H.R. 11036 (H.R. 11686) (page 361)
  6. (Nigeria) A traffic jam.

Noun

hold-ups pl (plural only)

  1. (UK, colloquial, plural, plural-only) Women's stockings designed to be worn without suspenders.
    • Yet the conventions of cheating possess an odd kind of romance, of the love affair perpetually stalled in its first stages, when no one on the platform at Paddington knows you're only wearing hold-ups under your mac and you can briefly return to the drama of being the woman you thought had died of...2007 July 8, Lisa Hilton, “I cheated...”, in The Observer

Questions about hold-ups

What does hold-ups mean?
Hold-ups means women's stockings designed to be worn without suspenders.
What is hold-ups the plural of?
Hold-ups is the plural of hold-up.
What part of speech is hold-ups?
Hold-ups is a noun.

Words near hold-ups in the dictionary

  1. hold-up plays
  2. hold-up squad
  3. hold-up squads
  4. hold-upper
  5. hold-uppers
  6. hold-ups
  7. holdable
  8. holdall
  9. holdalls
  10. holdase
  11. holdases

Source and license

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