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/bˈətrəs/ Listen

noun

Buttress n.

(Arch.) A projecting mass of masonry, used for resisting the thrust of an arch, or for ornament and symmetry. Note: When an external projection is used merely to stiffen a wall, it is a pier.

Anything which supports or strengthens. "The ground pillar and buttress of the good old cause of nonconformity."

Flying buttress. See Flying buttress.

verb

Buttress v. t. (past & past part. buttressed; pres. part. buttressing) To support with a buttress; to prop; to brace firmly. "To set it upright again, and to prop and buttress it up for duration."

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Etymology of 'Buttress'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books

... moment. The next he was walking slowly and steadily behind the convict, who led him between two or three bushes, and then along a narrow shelf which passed round the end of the rock slip; and as soon as it was cleared the buttress at that end grew still more narrow, so that the boy felt his right arm brushing against the perpendicular rock wall, while his left ...

— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn

... town of St. Malo—thrust out like a buttress into the sea, strange and grim of aspect, breathing war front its walls and battlements of ragged stone, a stronghold of privateers, the home of a race whose intractable and defiant independence neither time nor change has subdued—has ...

— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... intention of calling some one—the first person he met—to account. But the house that he had just quitted was gone. The wall! Ah, there it was, no longer purposeless, intrusive, and ivy-clad, but part of the buttress of another massive wall that rose into battlements above him. Mr. Clinch turned again hopelessly toward Sammtstadt. There was the fringe of poplars on the Rhine, there were the outlying fields lit by the same meridian sun; but the characteristic chimneys of Sammtstadt were gone. Mr. ...

— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... into the long and carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... mouldering walls Of the vast theatre, like the deep roar Of distant waves, or the tumultuous rush Of multitudes: the lichen creeps along Each yawning crevice, and the wild-flower hangs Its long festoons around each crumbling stone. The window's arch and massive buttress glow With time's deep tints, whilst cypress shadows wave On high, and spread a melancholy gloom. Silent forever is the voice Of Tragedy and Eloquence. In climes Far distant, and beneath a cloudy sky, The echo of their harps is heard; but all The ...

— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

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