Word.ws English Dictionary

maintaining appearances

maintaining appearances is the present participle and gerund of maintain appearances.

Meaning of maintain 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

Questions about maintaining appearances

What is maintaining appearances the present participle and gerund of?
Maintaining appearances is the present participle and gerund of maintain appearances.

Words near maintaining appearances in the dictionary

  1. maintainers
  2. maintainership
  3. maintainest
  4. maintaineth
  5. maintaining
  6. maintaining appearances
  7. maintainment
  8. maintainor
  9. maintainors
  10. maintains
  11. maintains appearances

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maintaining appearances (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “maintaining appearances.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/maintaining_appearances. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.