To stand one’s ground successfully against attack, competition, or some other pressure. The own here refers to position or advantage. In use since the sixteenth century, the expression was a cliché by the nineteenth century. It appears in a famous speech by Winston Churchill in 1942, during World War II: “Let me, however, make this clear. . . . We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” An alternate synonym is to hold one’s ground. James Patterson used it in his thriller, London Bridges (2004), in a response to a bomb thrown at a building: “A decision had been made not to abandon the building, to hold our ground.”