buttress

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.

noun

1. (architecture) A brick or stone structure built against another structure to support it.
   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.
   Crowell Buttresses, Dismal Buttress
   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. 2005, Will Cook, Until Darkness Disappears, page 54
   Two short pitches up a chimney-crack are followed by a traverse right to the centre of the buttress. 2010, Tony Howard, Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan, page 84
5. (figurative) Anything that supports or strengthens.
   the grand pillar and buttress of the good old cause of nonconformity October 30, 1692, Robert South, A Further Account of the Nature and Measures of Conscience

verb

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.
   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. 2021-04-14, Diana B. Henriques, “Bernard Madoff, Architect of Largest Ponzi Scheme in History, Is Dead at 82”, in The New York Times, →ISSN