A - You got us tickets? I thought the game was sold out. How did you get (a) hold of them?
B - I bought them from a guy on eBay.
Does "get (a) hold of" fit perfectly for this dialog? Would you include the "a" or not? Thanks.
A - You got us tickets? I thought the game was sold out.
A - You got us tickets? I thought the game was sold out. How did you get (a) hold of them?
B - I bought them from a guy on eBay.
Does "get (a) hold of" fit perfectly for this dialog? Would you include the "a" or not? Thanks.
B - I bought them from a guy on eBay.
Does "get (a) hold of" fit perfectly for this dialog? Both versions fit.
Would you include the "a"? I'd say How did you get them??
B - I bought them from a guy on eBay.
anonymousWould you include the "a" or not?
'get hold of' is used with greater frequency than 'get a hold of' on both the Google Ngrams site and the fraze.it site.
That said, I'd probably include "a" because that's how I've heard it and said it myself for years.
CJ
The word is "ahold", not "a hold". "Get hold of" sounds formal or British to this American. In my East Coast dialect, it's "get ahold of". The OED calls it "chiefly regional", so you should not use "ahold" in general writing.
And yet these days they are used about equally in American English according to G's Ngrams Viewer, and the frequency of "ahold" was greater than that of "a hold" only in the years 1952–1967. As for British English, the frequency of "ahold" has never exceeded that of "a hold".
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=get+ahold+of%2Cget+a+hold+of&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3
CJ