Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use buttress in a sentence

19 example sentences · noun, verb

Buttress means a brick, concrete or stone structure built against another structure to support it. Example: “Only the buttressed outer walls still stood.”

Examples of buttress by meaning

nounA brick, concrete or stone structure built against another structure to support it.

  • It was decided, therefore, to build eight concrete buttresses from the new strengthening work to safeguard the general stability of the wall along the length where the greatest movement had taken place.1954 June, “Strengthening of River Calder Retaining Wall, N.E.R.”, in Railway Magazine, page 429

nounA feature jutting prominently out from a mountain or rock.

  • Crowell Buttresses, Dismal Buttress
  • 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, →ISBN, page 84

verbTo support something or someone by supplying evidence.

  • Buttressed by elaborate account statements and a deep reservoir of trust from his investors and regulators, Mr.2021 April 14, Diana B. Henriques, “Bernard Madoff, Architect of Largest Ponzi Scheme in History, Is Dead at 82”, in The New York Times...

More sentences with buttress

  • Only the buttressed outer walls still stood.From the entry buttressed
  • One hazard is the tambour, a buttress which juts out and causes the ball to bounce unpredictably.2019, Simon Horobin, Bagels, Bumf, and Buses, page 150. From the entry tambour
  • Some soft, muffled bufferedness was bound to take over, as if she were buttressed by excess packaging.2016, Lionel Shriver, The Self-Seeding Sycamore. From the entry bufferedness
  • An interesting event happened in my house that buttressed my appreciation of glandulars.2010, Roy Mankovitz, The Wellness Project, page 158. From the entry glandular
  • In the crevices of the rock wall that buttresses the pool, a cast of crabs go about their crab business.2023, Nadine J. Cohen, Everyone and Everything, Pantera Press. From the entry cast
  • They were dug down one metre and backfilled with gravel or rubble stone to provide internal buttresses and deep drains.2021 April 7, “Network News: A long-standing problem: Victorian efforts to secure unstable slopes”, in RAIL, number 928, page 11. From the entry counterfort
  • The military post and gas depot where Qu stopped to refuel had been shored up by heavy concrete buttresses.1991, Jeremy Schmidt, Himalayan Passage: Seven Months in the High Country of Tibet, Nepal, China, India, & Pakistan, Seattle: The…. From the entry refuel
  • Buttressed by clothes, walls and objects, there was the bourgeois family, the most mysterious institution of the age.1975, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital. 1848-1875, published 1995, page 278. From the entry mysterious
  • Harold’s heavy hand with the scissors might explain his youngest son George’s taste in hairstyle: a vertiginous pompadour buttressed by head wings and a ducktail.2020, The Editors of PEOPLE, “George”, in PEOPLE Celebrating Beatlemania, page 31. From the entry ducktail
  • My father was forever trying to tame this lumpen block, buttressing it with rock gardens and rock walls garlanded with pigface, courtesy of my mother.2015, Magda Szubanski, Reckoning, Text Publishing, page 52. From the entry pigface
  • The autochthons’ defenders had sought to endow them with a special status in Poland, the better to buttress Poland’s claims to the Recovered Territories.2006, T. David Curp, “Counterrevolution from Above and Abroad: The Delocalization of Politics and the Beginning of Polish Stalinism's…. From the entry autochthon
  • The exterior façades of the Cordoba mosque are carefully composed, with buttresses interspersed with doorways which reflect the framed arch of the mihrab.1991, Barbara Brend, “Lands of the West: Egypt, North Africa and Spain”, in Islamic Art, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press…. From the entry merlon
  • My guess is that we can and I take it that my guess is buttressed by our ordinary practice of talking about the behaviour of animals and pre-linguistic children.2011, Steven Hales, What Philosophy Can Tell You about Your Dog, Open Court, →ISBN, page 214. From the entry contentful
  • Looking out from within the hillside, the entrance frames the buttress of Nab Scar, and on the floor a minnowed pool draws reflections from the sunlit boulders outside.1976, Vera Burden, History, People, and Places in the Lake District, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire: Spurbooks Limited, →ISBN, page 90. From the entry minnowed

Meaning of buttress

  1. noun A brick, concrete or stone structure built against another structure to support it.
  2. noun Anything that serves to support something; a prop.
  3. noun A buttress root.

Full definition of buttress

Questions about buttress in a sentence

How do you use buttress in a sentence?
Buttress is used as a noun and verb. For example: “Only the buttressed outer walls still stood.”
What is a short sentence with buttress?
“Crowell Buttresses, Dismal Buttress”
What does buttress mean?
Buttress means a brick, concrete or stone structure built against another structure to support it.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: buttress (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use buttress in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/buttress. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.