hold one's own

1. 1.

   be sufficiently competent in a certain situation

   “He can hold his own in graduate school”
2. 2.

   maintain one's position and be in control of a situation

   Broadercontrol

Questions about hold one's own

What does hold one's own mean?

hold one's own means "be sufficiently competent in a certain situation". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is hold one's own a common word?

hold one's own is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.