Word.ws English Dictionary

holdback

holdback noun: a restraint; a device or part of a device that operates to restrain.

Noun

holdback (countable and uncountable, plural holdbacks)

  1. A restraint; a device or part of a device that operates to restrain.
    • In a furnace, the combination of an upwardly moving holdback and a downwardly moving dumping grate, of interconnected means for conjointly elevating said holdback and partially lowering said grate and then oscillating said grate without appreciably moving said holdback.1914, Frank L. O. Wadsworth, “1103232: Furnace Grate”, in Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, page 399
    • The holdback hook assembly is made up of four key parts : the missile holdback hook (1), missile latch finger (4), missile latch lever (6) and eccentric shaft (B).1972, Direct Support and General Support Maintenance Manual, page 35
    1. The projection or loop, on the thill of a vehicle, to which a strap of the harness is attached, to hold back a carriage when going downhill, or in backing. Also, the strap or part of the harness so used.
      • All those devices, which heretofore have been constructed, wherein a spring has been applied as part of the holdback, are subject to derangement, owing to the uncertain action of the spring employed, and a liability of the sprint to get out of order, thus detracting from their efficiency.1861, John Davis, “No. 2551: Holdback for Carriages and other Vehicles”, in Letters patent - Volume 15
      • The object of my improvement is to obtain a draft and holdback attachment for hames which will be more durable and answer the purpose better than the old two-pronged staple or the circular clip.1871, George J. Letchworth, “116725: Improvement in Hames”, in Specifications and Drawings of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office
  2. A delay in the movement of solute due to the slowing effects of diffusion
    • Holdback is easier to determine than the dispersion coefficient, and where scatter of data is serious, mixing properties are easier to describe in terms of holdback.1969, Harry D. Surline, Longitudinal Liquid Mixing in a Packed Column with Cocurrent Or Countercurrent Air-water Flow, page 50
    • Holdback can also be seen as protecting solute-free water against invading solute.2011, Jan Gliński, Józef Horabik, Jerzy Lipiec, Encyclopedia of Agrophysics, page 423
  3. Income that is set aside for eventualities such as customer returns, seasonal fluctuations, performance bonuses, unexpected costs, etc.
    • The community Opportunity Bonus Fund incorporates a $250 million bonus pool, which would operate in the same manner as the original performance holdback.1995, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies, Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, And Independen...
    • When there is a holdback provision, the percentage placed in reserve by gainsharing plans typically ranges from a low of 10 percent to as much as 70 percent.2004, Joseph Boyett, Jimmie Boyett, The Gainsharing Design Manual, page 55
  4. A portion of the money that is owed to someone which is not paid, but instead held as security, until the entire job or contract has been successfully completed.
    • Holdback arrangements may be viewed as the reverse of kickbacks. There were nine retailers who reported a holdback requirement by finance companies.1968, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the District of Columbia, Hearings, Reports and Prints of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia
    • The proposed amendments to the regulation provided a procedure whereby the contractor's 10 percent holdback would be retained by the mortgagee to be paid into an escrow account, minus certain amounts, when the project has been substantially completed, as determined by HUD .1977, Federal Register - Volume 42, Issues 1-5, page 763
  5. Money that a buyer does not pay at the time of purchase, but which is paid afterward (sometimes in installments, sometimes on a specified date).
    • Accordingly, credit enhancement was provided by a 7.5 percent "holdback" whereby the purchasers withheld 7.5 percent of the purchase price at the closing.1991, James A. Rosenthal, Juan M. Ocampo, Securitization of Credit: Inside the New Technology of Finance
    • The simplest way for the buyer to obtain protection is to agree on a holdback. This means that the buyer on closing only pays part of the purchase price and retains additional installment(s) for a certain period of time.2005, Philip Martinius, M & A: Protecting the Purchaser, page 40
  6. (car sales) The difference between a dealer's cost and the manufacturer's suggested retail price.
    • The discount holdback is a part of the overall discount enjoyed by all dealers of Dodge vehicles, and it is inconspicuously noted on each invoice that petitioner receives. The purpose of the discount holdback is to place Dodge dealers in a better competititve position with their rivals by placing...1973, Reports of the United States Tax Court - Volume 60, page 886
    • Holdback was instituted in the early 1960s, we understand, as a way to ensure that dealers would have money on hand to pay Uncle Sam at tax time.1993, William Bragg, In the Driver's Seat: The New Car Buyer's Negotiating Bible, page 82
  7. A time period during which sales of a specific security or commodity cannot occur.
    • Schedule 1.02 should list each Shareholder and the Shareholder's proportional share of the Purchase Price, including the amounts scheduled to be distributed from the Escrow Fund after the holdback period has expired.2003, Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, page 221
    • Rather than disseminating each individual change, the holdback timer permits CBOE to wait until multiple market participants have adjusted their quotes and then to disseminate a new quotation.2007, United States. Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC Docket - Volume 90, Part 2, page 1772
  8. A time period after the first release of a creative work before it can be distributed or adapted to other channels.
    • It called for a rights framework which delivered a "clear, consistent and timely rights regime for all platforms" and minimum holdback periods.2007, Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Culture, Media and Sport Committee, New media and the creative industries
    • Reserved rights are often subject to holdback provisions . A holdback provision requires a copyright or other rights owner to refrain from licensing certain rights for a limited period of time .2014, Thomas A. Crowell, The Pocket Lawyer for Comic Book Creators
  9. A legal provision for restricting distributions to a trust beneficiary under certain conditions.
    • If such a holdback provision applies to income being paid from a life estate power of appointment trust (or to the exercisability of the general power of appointment of such a trust), which has been created either to qualify for the marital deduction or the orphan's deduction, obviously such a...1980, The Annual Institute on Estate Planning, pages 5-19
    • A holdback provision gives the trustee discretion to hold back funds upon the occurrence of specified events.1998, Sidney Kess, Barbara Weltman ·, KESS on Financial and Estate Planning, page 77
  10. The withholding of permits to extract a natural resource.
    • It is only a holdback for resource development, and with the increasing use by people of these resources, it is coming to a critical stage, Mr. Secretary, it doesn't seem to me that we are going to be able to hold back too much longer.1968, United States. Congress. House Committee on Appropriations, Hearings - Volume 9, page 41
    • You have the question of the supposed holdback of the allocations, and yet the law allows you and the President to alter the allocation without a change of law for 90 days.1974, United States. Congress. Senate. Governmental Operations Committee, To Establish a Department of Energy and Natural Resources, Energy Research and Develoopment Administration, and a Nuclear...
  11. A designation of some details about a crime that the police deliberately do not reveal to the public.
    • The result was less a policy as much as a culture of information management among the inner sanctum of detectives working an open and active case, on in which there were strict safeguards placed around what became a nearly universal policy in holdback evidence.2016, Michael Arntfield, Gothic Forensics, page 92
    • The probative value of this kind of evidence is often overstated, as holdback evidence can be transmitted to the accused via prior interactions with the police.2020, Christopher Lutes, “Hart Failure: Assessing the Mr. Big Confessions Framework Five Years Later”, in Manitoba Law Journal: Criminal Law Edition, page 218
  12. A random subset of a body of data that is not used in the main analysis, but rather reserved for other purposes, such as validation.
    • In the holdback methods, a sample of the observations is withheld (the holdback sample) while the remaining observations are used to train a neural net.2016, Ian Cox, Marie A. Gaudard, Mia L. Stephens, Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean, page 495
    • Since the holdback sample has different random noise, its calculated error will begin to increase.2017, Ron Klimberg, B. D. McCullough, Fundamentals of Predictive Analytics with JMP

Verb

holdback (third-person singular simple present holdbacks, present participle holdbacking, simple past and past participle holdbacked)

  1. To set up a holdback.
    • Only 20 percent of the "debtors' attorney" judges normally don't holdback, compared to 44 percent of the other cohort.1993, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Courts and Administrative Practice, Professional Fees in Bankruptcy, page 225
    • Trustee given power to holdback distributions if adverse to beneficiary's interest .2000, History and Philosophy of Taxation - Volume 46, page 5

Examples of holdback in a sentence

  • If the forward holdback tension is not within allowable limits, the TV will display a flagging or tearing picture at the top of the screen.1998, Robert Brenner, Gregory Capelo, VCR Troubleshooting and Repair, page 350:
  • Accessories for the catapulting system include a tension bar and a catapult holdback bar.2008, A-7 Corsair Pilot's Flight Operating Manual, pages 1-92:
  • Before going through the buckle, make sure the holdback strap passes over the trace so the trace is encompassed by the holdback strap.2014, Steve Bowers, Marlen Steward, Driving Horses:
  • The concepts of preferential flow and mobile and immobile water are related to each other and to that of the holdback of solute against leaching.2022, H. Magdi Selim, Liwang Ma, Physical Nonequilibrium in Soils: Modeling and Application, page 225:

Forms of holdback

Noun
pluralholdbacks
Verb
third-person singular presentholdbacks
present participleholdbacking
past participleholdbacked
pastholdbacked

Origin of holdback

From hold + back.

Questions about holdback

What does holdback mean?
Holdback means a restraint; a device or part of a device that operates to restrain.
How do you use holdback in a sentence?
If the forward holdback tension is not within allowable limits, the TV will display a flagging or tearing picture at the top of the screen.
What part of speech is holdback?
Holdback can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of holdback?
The plural of holdback is holdbacks.

Words near holdback in the dictionary

  1. holdases
  2. Holdaway
  3. holdawayite
  4. holdawayites
  5. Holdaways
  6. holdback
  7. holdbacks
  8. holddown
  9. holddowns
  10. holde
  11. holded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: holdback (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:

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