Word.ws English Dictionary

holding onto

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

Meaning of hold onto

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To manage to keep something.
    • Desperate to hold onto power, Pervez Musharraf has discarded Pakistan's constitutional framework and declared a state of emergency.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see hold, onto.

Questions about holding onto

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

Words near holding onto in the dictionary

  1. holding one's pee
  2. holding one's piss
  3. holding one's tongue
  4. holding one's water
  5. holding oneself together
  6. holding onto
  7. holding out
  8. holding over
  9. holding over someone's head
  10. holding pattern
  11. holding patterns

Source and license

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