Hold

How to spell hold

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hold

What does hold mean?

1. verbTo grasp, keep, or support something, or to maintain a position or state.
2. nounThe act or manner of grasping something, or a controlling influence over it.
3. nounThe lower interior space of a ship or aircraft where cargo is stored.

Hold in a sentence

• verb

  Please hold the door open while the boxes are carried inside.

• noun

  She kept a firm hold on the railing as she climbed the icy steps.

• noun

  The crew loaded the crates of machinery into the ship's hold.

• verb

  The small shelf cannot hold the weight of all those books.

• noun

  The new manager soon gained a tight hold over the department's budget.

• noun

  Baggage handlers stacked the suitcases in the aircraft hold before departure.

Where does hold come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending from the Old English verb healdan, which carried a broad range of meanings including 'to keep', 'to guard', 'to contain', and 'to watch over'. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root haldan, and close relatives survive in modern German halten and Dutch houden, both meaning 'to hold' or 'to keep'. The original sense leaned heavily on the idea of tending or keeping watch, as a herdsman holds and guards his flock, before settling into the everyday sense of grasping or maintaining something. The noun for a ship's cargo space looks like the same word but actually came from a separate Old English word, hol, meaning 'hollow', later reshaped under the influence of the verb. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, hold rarely troubles writers, though its many idiomatic uses keep it one of the most frequently written verbs in English.

How the word is built

• hold (from Old English healdan: to keep, contain, watch over)