Word.ws English Dictionary

too hot to hold

too hot to hold adjective: a place that has too much police activity to harbor a fugitive unnoticed.

Adjective

too hot to hold someone

  1. (UK, idiomatic) A place that has too much police activity to harbor a fugitive unnoticed.
    • "He made England too hot to hold him, fled to Central America, and died there in 1876 of yellow fever."1901, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, page 18

Origin of too hot to hold

"Hot" items are stolen goods.

Questions about too hot to hold

What does too hot to hold mean?
Too hot to hold means a place that has too much police activity to harbor a fugitive unnoticed.
What part of speech is too hot to hold?
Too hot to hold is an adjective.

Words near too hot to hold in the dictionary

  1. too good to be true
  2. too good to last
  3. too hard basket
  4. too hard baskets
  5. too hot to handle
  6. too hot to hold
  7. too late
  8. too little, too late
  9. too long; didn't read
  10. too many
  11. too many balls in the air

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: too hot to hold (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-too hot to hold.ogg.

Cite this entry: “too hot to hold.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/too_hot_to_hold. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.