Hold-ups

noun, slang

noun, slang ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    plural of hold-up form-of, plural
  2. 2
    Women's stockings designed to be worn without suspenders. UK, colloquial, plural, plural-only

    "Yet the conventions of cheating possess an odd kind of romance, of the love affair perpetually stalled in its first stages, when no one on the platform at Paddington knows you're only wearing hold-ups under your mac and you can briefly return to the drama of being the woman you thought had died of boredom somewhere on the thousand-and-eleventh trip to Waitrose."

Example

More examples

"Yet the conventions of cheating possess an odd kind of romance, of the love affair perpetually stalled in its first stages, when no one on the platform at Paddington knows you're only wearing hold-ups under your mac and you can briefly return to the drama of being the woman you thought had died of boredom somewhere on the thousand-and-eleventh trip to Waitrose."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.