Word.ws English Dictionary

maintain appearances

maintain appearances verb: synonym of keep up appearances.

Verb

maintain appearances (third-person singular simple present maintains appearances, present participle maintaining appearances, simple past and past participle maintained appearances)

  1. Synonym of keep up appearances.
    • Under the guise of being “online” and capable of disseminating news instantaneously (known colloquially as “retweeting”), being active on Twitter, for media workers, gives the effect of fulfilling one’s occupational duty as well as all the parts of professional upkeep that, in the physical world...April 14 2022, Delia Cai, “Severance, the New York Times’s Twitter Guidelines, and the Forever Illusion of Work-Life Balance”, in Vanity Fair

Synonyms of maintain appearances

Forms of maintain appearances

third-person singular presentmaintains appearances
present participlemaintaining appearances
past participlemaintained appearances
pastmaintained appearances

Questions about maintain appearances

What does maintain appearances mean?
Maintain appearances means synonym of keep up appearances.
What part of speech is maintain appearances?
Maintain appearances is a verb.
What is the past tense of maintain appearances?
The past tense of maintain appearances is maintained appearances.

Words near maintain appearances in the dictionary

  1. mainswore
  2. mainsworn
  3. Maint.
  4. Maintada
  5. maintain
  6. maintain appearances
  7. maintainabilities
  8. maintainability
  9. maintainable
  10. maintainableness
  11. maintaine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maintain appearances (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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