Word.ws English Dictionary

hold fire

hold fire verb: to wait for an opportunity to shoot (with a firearm) at something or someone.

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!
      • Hold your 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

Synonyms of hold fire

Antonyms

Forms of hold fire

third-person singular presentholds fire
present participleholding fire
past participleheld fire
pastheld fire

Questions about hold fire

What does hold fire mean?
Hold fire means to wait for an opportunity to shoot (with a firearm) at something or someone.
What part of speech is hold fire?
Hold fire is a verb.
What is the past tense of hold fire?
The past tense of hold fire is held fire.

Words near hold fire in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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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