Visual Dictionary: Buttress

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Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.

This is a buttress.  A buttress is a support built against a wall to reinforce it.

Buttress can also be used metaphorically, as a noun or a verb.

To score highly on the GRE essays, you should buttress your arguments with relevant and specific examples.

She never wore her contact lenses; she felt that her image as an intellectual requried the buttress of a sharp pair of glasses.

Before approaching the Princess of Monaco with his famous line, “Did someone leave the oven door open or did your face start a heat wave?”, he buttressed his courage with a gin and tonic.