buttress
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English
Buttress (sense 1)
Buttress (sense 3) tree roots of a kapok tree
Milestone Buttress (sense 4) on Tryfan. The direct route is highlighted.
Alternative forms
Etymology
From Old French ars bouterez (noun, literally “supporting arcs”), from bouterez (adj), oblique plural of bouteret (rare in the singular), from Frankish *botan, from Proto-Germanic *bautaną (“to push”). Ultimately cognate with beat.
Pronunciation
Noun
buttress (plural buttresses)
- (architecture) A brick or stone structure built against another structure to support it.
- Synonyms: counterfort, brace
- Hyponym: flying buttress
- Coordinate term: pilaster
- (by extension) Anything that serves to support something; a prop.
- (botany) A buttress-root.
- (climbing) A feature jutting prominently out from a mountain or rock.
- Synonyms: crag, bluff
- Crowell Buttresses, Dismal Buttress
- 2005, Will Cook, Until Darkness Disappears, page 54:
- All that day they rode into broken land. The prairie with its grass and rolling hills was behind them, and they entered a sparse, dry, rocky country, full of draws and short cañons and ominous buttresses.
- 2010, Tony Howard, Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan, →ISBN, page 84:
- Two short pitches up a chimney-crack are followed by a traverse right to the centre of the buttress.
- (figurative) Anything that supports or strengthens.
- 1692 October 30, Robert South, A Further Account of the Nature and Measures of Conscience:
- the grand pillar and buttress of the good old cause of nonconformity
Derived terms
Translations
brick or stone structure built against another structure to support it
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anything that serves to support something
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feature jutting out from mountain; crag, bluff
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Verb
buttress (third-person singular simple present buttresses, present participle buttressing, simple past and past participle buttressed)
- To support something physically with, or as if with, a prop or buttress.
- (figurative, by extension) To support something or someone by supplying evidence.
- Synonyms: corroborate, substantiate
- 2021 April 14, Diana B. Henriques, “Bernard Madoff, Architect of Largest Ponzi Scheme in History, Is Dead at 82”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Buttressed by elaborate account statements and a deep reservoir of trust from his investors and regulators, Mr. Madoff steered his fraud scheme safely through a severe recession in the early 1990s, a global financial crisis in 1998 and the anxious aftermath of the terrorist attacks in September 2001.
Translations
support something physically with, or as if with, a buttress
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support something or someone by supplying evidence
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