buttress

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

The old adobe hall was buttressed along its outer walls with...  (source) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 1992

I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold.  (source) Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886

Windblown drifts buttressed the house—something moved on the second floor—a hand holding back the edge of a drape.†  (source) Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game, 1978

On either flank, a shadowy row of sleek buttresses jutted out like the ribs of a beautiful beast.†  (source) Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003

My red shoes are off, my legs tucked up underneath me on the chair, surrounded by a buttress of red skirt, true, but tucked nonetheless, as at a campfire, of earlier and more picnic days.†  (source) Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, 1985

Filling three full city blocks, rising more than a hundred and fifty meters to its central, sharpened spire, the Shrike Church's central temple was part awe-inspiring cathedral, part Gothic joke with its fluid, buttressed curves of stone permabonded to its whiskered-alloy skeleton, part Escher print with its tricks of perspective and impossible angles, part Boschian nightmare with its tunnel entrances, hidden chambers, dark gardens, and forbidden sections, and-more than anything else-it had been part of Hyperion's past.†  (source) Dan Simmons, Hyperion, 1989

"Geek flowers" was the completed research that pih-ers presented to Farmer or Kim, and "scholbutt" was short for "scholarly buttressing," which meant that every statement of fact Farmer made in a paper had to be verified as coming from some authoritative source.†  (source) Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, 2003

The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief superintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everything is now so smooth and regular.†  (source) Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1869

Harold Crosby, or any other Announcing Angel, could never be concealed in these buttresses.†  (source) John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989

He was about to buttress Yousef's claims against his father, but realized he couldn't do that.†  (source) Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King, 2112

After a while, without saying anything, I went to the side of the road and lay down on a pile of damp leaves between the tall, buttressed roots of a kapok tree.†  (source) Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 1998

But the warmth, the glow, evidently does not regard or need buttressing either; neither is it quenched by the actuality of an orange and eggs and toast.†  (source) William Faulkner, Light in August, 1932

She turned the pages of the sketchbook and looked at the inky drawings of crossbeams and braces or turrets and buttresses, and she saw the measurements and notes, none of which meant anything to her.†  (source) Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones, 2002

Out of the grove they pulled to the steep divide, which was no more than a buttress of Sonoma Mountain.†  (source) London, Jack, The Valley of the Moon

His tracks led toward the east buttress of Denali, straight through a labyrinth of giant crevasses, evidence that he had made no apparent effort to circumvent obvious hazards.  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, 1996

I stepped up onto the ridge so he could flatten himself against the buttress.  (source) Tara Westover, Educated, 2018

I ran down the ridge to the flat walkway near the buttress.  (source) Tara Westover, Educated, 2018

he could see the arched buttresses of the cathedral dome  (source) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 1992

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, Nor coigne of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendant bed and procreant cradle,  (source) William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1606

The stars are the great Gothic churches: spires, naves, delicate flying buttresses, massive conventional buttresses, stained glass and grandeur, grandeur, grandeur.†  (source) John Corry