Word.ws English Dictionary

holds firm

holds firm is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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 holds firm

What is holds firm the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Holds firm is the third-person singular simple present indicative of hold firm.

Words near holds firm in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: holds 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.

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