Holp

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An archaic past tense form meaning that someone once aided or assisted another person in a task or time of need
2. Old-fashioned simple past form signifying that a person gave aid or support to someone who needed it
3. A dated preterite of the verb meaning to assist, used to describe having lent aid to another in the past

Etymology: "Holp" is the past tense of "help," a form that was once standard English and has now almost vanished. It comes from Middle English "holp," the first and third person singular past form of "helpen," which descends from Old English "healp," the same past form of "helpan." Old English past tenses like this followed a strong verb pattern in which the vowel changed to mark the past, a pattern many verbs in English still follow, as with "drive" and "drove" or "sing" and "sang." The verb's older root reaches back to Proto-Germanic "*halp," the ancestral form that also gave German "half," which is cognate with it. The shared origin is the same verb, and the "half" connection is a distant relative rather than a sense link. Middle Dutch had the matching form "holp," but modern Dutch has replaced it with "hielp." Readers today mostly meet "holp" in older translations of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer, where it was the normal past tense for centuries before "helped" took over.

Synonyms: helped, aided, assisted, supported, abetted

Antonyms: hindered, obstructed, hampered, impeded, harmed