Word.ws English Dictionary

upholding

upholding is the present participle and gerund of uphold.

Meaning of uphold

Verb

uphold (third-person singular simple present upholds, present participle upholding, simple past upheld, past participle upheld or (archaic) upholden)

  1. (transitive) To hold up; to lift on high; to elevate.
    • The mournful train/ Echoed her grief, [...]/ With groans, and hands upheld, to move his mind, /Besought his pity to their helpless kind1899, John Dryden, Geoffrey Chaucer, Percival Chubb, Dryden's Palamon and Arcite, page 5
  2. (transitive) To keep erect; to support; to sustain; to keep from falling.
    • A man's pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.1769, The King James Bible, Proverbs 29:23
  3. (transitive) To support by approval or encouragement; to vindicate; to confirm (something which has been questioned).
    • let any moral come along and she would uphold it1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    vindicate

See all 4 meanings of uphold

Noun

upholding (plural upholdings)

  1. The act by which something is upheld.
    • […] the considerable political controversy that has surrounded important historical instances of judicial invalidations and judicial upholdings of federal legislation […]2010, Tom S. Clark, The Limits of Judicial Independence

Forms of upholding

pluralupholdings

Questions about upholding

What does upholding mean?
Upholding means the act by which something is upheld.
What is upholding the present participle and gerund of?
Upholding is the present participle and gerund of uphold.
What part of speech is upholding?
Upholding is a noun.
What is the plural of upholding?
The plural of upholding is upholdings.

Words near upholding in the dictionary

  1. upholdatory
  2. upholden
  3. upholder
  4. upholders
  5. upholdeth
  6. upholding
  7. upholdings
  8. upholds
  9. upholdster
  10. upholdsters
  11. upholdstery

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: upholding (page history and authors); uphold (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: “upholding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/upholding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.