Held

How to spell held

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce held

What does held mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'hold': to have grasped, kept, contained, or organised something.

Held in a sentence

• She held the baby gently throughout the long flight.

• The committee held its annual meeting in the same hall every year.

Where does held come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'hold', which descends from the Old English 'healdan', meaning 'to keep, guard, watch over, or contain'. 'Healdan' was a strong verb, the class of Germanic verbs that mark the past by changing the vowel inside the word rather than by adding a '-ed' ending, and its old past form 'heold' is the direct ancestor of modern 'held'. The same Germanic root produced related words in Dutch ('houden') and German ('halten'), so the family is widespread across the Germanic languages. Because it is a strong verb, 'held' keeps a short spelling that surprises some writers who expect a regular '-ed' form like 'holded'. The vowel shift from the 'o' of 'hold' to the 'e' of 'held' is a clean reminder that the word follows the older Germanic pattern rather than the regular one.

How the word is built

• held (past tense and past participle of 'hold', from Old English 'heold', the strong-verb form of 'healdan')