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persist

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pəˈsɪst//
  • United States//pɚˈsɪst//

To go on stubbornly or resolutely.

verb

  1. 1

    To go on stubbornly or resolutely.

    There is a way in which Britain is certain to have war and its horrors and calamities; it is this--by persisting in her present course of unpreparedness, her apathy, unintelligence, and blindness, and in her disregard of the warnings of the most ordinary political insight, as well as of the example of history.

  2. 2

    To repeat an utterance.

  3. 3

    To continue to exist.

    Much of this prejudice, indeed, persists; for instance, in the heavy handicappings with which insurance companies saddle their West Indian policies, […]

    Throughout the period, toothy giants persisted in the oceans. Perhaps the most spectacular was the megalodon shark.

  4. 4

    obsoleteTo continue to be; to remain.

  5. 5

    To cause to persist; make permanent.

    This would not be saved after his session terminates because we don't have an actual user identity to allow us to persist the settings.

    While hashtags aren't formally part of Twitter, some clients, such as Tweetdeck, will persist hashtags across replies to create a sort of message threading.

Etymology

From Middle French persister (Modern French persister), from Latin persistere, from per- + sistere (“to stand”).

Forms

past tense
persisted
past participle
persisted
present participle
persisting
third person singular
persists
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).