Word.ws English Dictionary

holding firm

holding firm is the present participle and gerund of hold firm.

Meaning of hold firm

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To keep to a conviction, practice, etc., unwaveringly.
    • .... the depressed person's emotional agony had so completely overwhelmed her... that whenever a member of her Support System finally said that she was dreadfully sorry but she absolutely had to get off the telephone, the primal instinct for sheer emotional survival now drove the depressed person...1998 January, David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”, in Harpers Magazine, page 63

Questions about holding firm

What is holding firm the present participle and gerund of?
Holding firm is the present participle and gerund of hold firm.

Words near holding firm in the dictionary

  1. holding dear
  2. holding down
  3. holding down the fort
  4. holding fast
  5. holding fire
  6. holding firm
  7. holding for ransom
  8. holding forth
  9. holding good
  10. holding hostage
  11. holding in

Source and license

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