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Buttress

Architecture
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A projecting support built against a wall. Poetically, it represents reinforcement, endurance, or the visible aid that keeps something standing.

Detailed Definition
A buttress bears pressure that a wall could not safely carry alone, so it offers poets a concrete figure for loyalty, grief, tradition, and communal strength. Because it stands outside the main structure, it can also represent help that is overlooked but essential. In a poem, a friend may be a buttress to mourning, a refrain may buttress an unstable argument, or a landscape may appear to support the weathered architecture of a speaker’s memory.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Grief was the buttress holding up his ruined faith” uses buttress as a metaphor for support; A poet can call old letters “buttresses against forgetting”; “The mountain stood as a buttress to the storm” gives the landscape architectural strength; In a sonnet, repeated rhyme may serve as a buttress that supports an otherwise unstable emotional argument
Additional Notes
A buttress makes a wall stronger from the outside. It can image friendship, memory, or labor that visibly sustains a speaker.
Also Known As
Counterfort Abutment
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