Word.ws English Dictionary

holding good

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

Meaning of hold good

Verb

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

  1. (intransitive) To continue being true or valid; to hold true.
    • That explanation does not hold good in this matter.
    Synonyms:
    hold
  2. (intransitive) To remain effective, fast, or secure.
    • She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good! / She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood! / They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years, / Till, now, on the stroke of midnight, / Cold, on the stroke of midnight, / The...1906 August, Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”, in Poems, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., published October 1906, →OCLC, part 2, stanza IV, pages 50–51

Questions about holding good

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

Words near holding good in the dictionary

  1. holding fast
  2. holding fire
  3. holding firm
  4. holding for ransom
  5. holding forth
  6. holding good
  7. holding hostage
  8. holding in
  9. holding in contempt
  10. holding in derision
  11. holding in hand

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: holding good (page history and authors); hold good (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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