stay the course
stay the course verb: to persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.
Verb
stay the course (third-person singular simple present stays the course, present participle staying the course, simple past and past participle stayed the course)
- To persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.
- If you decide to stay the course and finish engineering school, it will mean long hours and sleepless nights.
- This sort of thing is meat and drink to the born Controller—and Controllers are born with the right imperturbable temperament for the job; hence the fact that they are recruited from many different grades of operating staff, and some recruits don't stay the course.1962 August, G. Freeman Allen, “Traffic control on the Great Northern Line”, in Modern Railways, page 132
- Synonyms:
- stay the distance
Synonyms of stay the course
Forms of stay the course
| third-person singular present | stays the course |
|---|---|
| present participle | staying the course |
| past participle | stayed the course |
| past | stayed the course |
Questions about stay the course
- What does stay the course mean?
- Stay the course means to persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.
- What part of speech is stay the course?
- Stay the course is a verb.
- What is the past tense of stay the course?
- The past tense of stay the course is stayed the course.
Words near stay the course in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stay the course (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-stay the course.ogg.
Cite this entry: “stay the course.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stay_the_course. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.