See retain in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"forms": [
{
"form": "retain",
"tags": [
"canonical"
]
},
{
"form": "retains",
"tags": [
"third-person",
"singular"
]
},
{
"form": "retained",
"tags": [
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "retained",
"tags": [
"past",
"participle"
]
},
{
"form": "retaining",
"tags": [
"present",
"participle"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
"name": "verb"
}
],
"hyphenation": "re‧tain",
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [],
"examples": [
{
"text": "After the election, the government retained control of the lower house, but lost the upper house."
},
{
"text": "The company retains the right to change the price at any time."
},
{
"text": "They joined the group but still managed to retain their independence at the same time."
}
],
"glosses": [
"If you retain something, you keep it."
],
"id": "simple-retain-en-verb-AiFGQ98J",
"raw_tags": [
"transitive"
]
},
{
"categories": [],
"examples": [
{
"text": "Since being charged by police, Black has retained a lawyer."
},
{
"text": "With better wages abroad it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain employees."
}
],
"glosses": [
"If you retain someone (usually a professional), you pay them to do a job."
],
"id": "simple-retain-en-verb-ZUSemw2t",
"raw_tags": [
"transitive"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"ipa": "/rɪˈteɪn/"
},
{
"audio": "en-us-retain.ogg",
"tags": [
"US"
]
}
],
"word": "retain"
}
{
"forms": [
{
"form": "retain",
"tags": [
"canonical"
]
},
{
"form": "retains",
"tags": [
"third-person",
"singular"
]
},
{
"form": "retained",
"tags": [
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "retained",
"tags": [
"past",
"participle"
]
},
{
"form": "retaining",
"tags": [
"present",
"participle"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
"name": "verb"
}
],
"hyphenation": "re‧tain",
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"Transitive verbs"
],
"examples": [
{
"text": "After the election, the government retained control of the lower house, but lost the upper house."
},
{
"text": "The company retains the right to change the price at any time."
},
{
"text": "They joined the group but still managed to retain their independence at the same time."
}
],
"glosses": [
"If you retain something, you keep it."
],
"raw_tags": [
"transitive"
]
},
{
"categories": [
"Transitive verbs"
],
"examples": [
{
"text": "Since being charged by police, Black has retained a lawyer."
},
{
"text": "With better wages abroad it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain employees."
}
],
"glosses": [
"If you retain someone (usually a professional), you pay them to do a job."
],
"raw_tags": [
"transitive"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"ipa": "/rɪˈteɪn/"
},
{
"audio": "en-us-retain.ogg",
"tags": [
"US"
]
}
],
"word": "retain"
}
Download raw JSONL data for retain meaning in English (1.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-16 from the simplewiktionary dump dated 2025-04-03 using wiktextract (b0b7a66 and 3185d56). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.