buttress

Buttress (sense 1)

Buttress (sense 3) tree roots of a kapok tree

Milestone Buttress (sense 4) on Tryfan. The direct route is highlighted.

• buttrice

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.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈbʌtɹəs/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈbʌtɹɪs/

buttress (plural buttresses)

1. (architecture) A brick or stone structure built against another structure to support it.

   Synonyms: counterfort, brace

   Hyponym: flying buttress

   Coordinate term: pilaster

2. (by extension) Anything that serves to support something; a prop.
3. (botany) A buttress-root.
4. (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.

5. (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

buttress (third-person singular simple present buttresses, present participle buttressing, simple past and past participle buttressed)

1. To support something physically with, or as if with, a prop or buttress.
2. (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^[1], →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.

• buttress on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• betrusts