Other forms: beholding, beholds
To behold is to look at something, in old or formal English. Behold the sea, a sight to behold, lo and behold.
It is archaic and survives in the Bible, in poetry and in deliberate flourish. The past tense is beheld. Two phrases keep it alive in ordinary speech: a sight to behold, meaning impressive or absurd, and lo and behold, which introduces something predictable presented as a surprise. Note beholden, which is a different word meaning obliged to somebody, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
1verbbeholdTo look at something, in old or formal use.
“Behold the finest cathedral in the country, according to the sign.”
behold is a way of looking.
Old English behealdan meant to hold or keep as well as to look at. The holding sense survives in beholden, and the looking sense in behold, so one Old English verb split into two modern words with no obvious connection.
Proto-Indo-European
*kel-
Proto-West Germanic
*bihaldan — to hold with, keep
Old English
behealdan — to hold, possess, preserve, belong, keep, observe, look at, take care, beware, be cautious, restrain, act, behave
Middle English
biholden
English, today
behold
From Middle English biholden, from Old English behealdan (“to hold, possess, preserve, belong, keep, observe, look at, take care, beware, be cautious, restrain, act, behave”), from Proto-West Germanic bihaldan (“to hold with, keep”), equivalent to be + hold. Cognate with stq behoolde (“to keep”), Dutch behouden (“to keep, restrain, preserve”), German behalten (“to keep, restrain, remember”), Danish - and Norwegian beholde (“to keep”) and Swedish behålla (“to keep”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA