Fri Jul 16 2021 at 3:03:44 The adverb 'ahold' is an Americanism that exists entirely in orthography. Most English speakers will recognize the construct "get a hold of"; in America, it is normal to write this as "get ahold of". This has become so common that Merriam-Webster.com, Cambridge Dictionary, Macmillan Dictionary, and American Heritage Dictionary all have this definition as their primary definition; Wiktionary regulates it to the second definition (under the traditional, and archaic, definition of keeping a ship held steady into the wind while sailing out from shore), and the Oxford English Dictionary only recognizes it as "a-hold", identifying it as a dialectal or colloquial form.