Meaning & use
hold someone accountable
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Meanings
phraseidiom
To treat a person as responsible for what they did and make them answer for it, often by punishment or criticism.
Grammar: Needs an object in the middle and usually for: hold the manager accountable for the loss.
Patterns
- hold someone accountable for something
- hold someone accountable
Voters want to hold the mayor accountable for the budget failure.
The school held the students accountable for the damage.
We cannot hold her accountable for a mistake she did not know about.
phraseidiom
To check that you or someone else keeps a promise, goal or standard.
Grammar: Often used with a reflexive pronoun: hold yourself accountable to your goals.
Patterns
- hold yourself accountable
- hold someone accountable to something
I text my friend each week so she can hold me accountable to my training plan.
Good managers hold themselves accountable to the same rules as their staff.
The team holds each other accountable for meeting deadlines.
Word forms
| third person singular | holds someone accountable |
|---|---|
| past tense | held someone accountable |
| past participle | held someone accountable |
| -ing form | holding someone accountable |
Common combinations
- hold officials accountable
- A free press helps hold officials accountable.
- hold yourself accountable
- She holds herself accountable for every deadline.
- hold accountable for their actions
- Parents should hold children accountable for their actions.
- be held accountable
- Companies must be held accountable for pollution.
- fully accountable
- He was held fully accountable for the error.
Synonyms and how they differ
- blame
- Blame focuses on saying someone is at fault, while hold accountable also implies they must face consequences or explain themselves.
- hold responsible
- Hold responsible is nearly the same but sounds a little less formal and less tied to answering to an authority.
- call to account
- Call to account means to demand an explanation, which is narrower than treating someone as accountable overall.
Opposites
Word family
- accountable adjective
- expected to explain and accept responsibility
- accountability noun
- the state of being answerable for actions
- account verb
- to explain or give a reason, as in account for
- unaccountable adjective
- not answerable to anyone, or impossible to explain
Commonly confused: hold someone accountable or hold responsible?
hold someone accountable vs hold responsible
Both are close, but hold accountable stresses that the person must answer for results, often to an authority or the public.
Practice
Citizens should be able to hold their leaders ___ their decisions.
Choose one answer.
The pattern is hold someone accountable for something. Accounting for and responsive of break the pattern, and blamed for does not fit after hold.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “hold someone accountable”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.