Word.ws English Dictionary

hold one's nerve

hold one's nerve verb: to stay calm facing nervousness.

Verb

hold one's nerve (third-person singular simple present holds one's nerve, present participle holding one's nerve, simple past and past participle held one's nerve)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To stay calm facing nervousness.
    • She held her nerve after failing to serve out the match at the first attempt, seeing three match points slip by in a nervous service game at 6-4 5-4 and recovering from losing the tie-break to dominate the decider.2011 June 28, Piers Newbery, “Wimbledon 2011: Sabine Lisicki beats Marion Bartoli”, in BBC Sport

Forms of hold one's nerve

third-person singular presentholds one's nerve
present participleholding one's nerve
past participleheld one's nerve
pastheld one's nerve

Questions about hold one's nerve

What does hold one's nerve mean?
Hold one's nerve means to stay calm facing nervousness.
What part of speech is hold one's nerve?
Hold one's nerve is a verb.
What is the past tense of hold one's nerve?
The past tense of hold one's nerve is held one's nerve.

Words near hold one's nerve in the dictionary

  1. hold one's head high
  2. hold one's horses
  3. hold one's jaw
  4. hold one's liquor
  5. hold one's mouth right
  6. hold one's nerve
  7. hold one's nose
  8. hold one's nose up
  9. hold one's own
  10. hold one's peace
  11. hold one's pee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hold one's nerve (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hold one's nerve.ogg.

Cite this entry: “hold one's nerve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hold_one%27s_nerve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.