Bastion

How to spell bastion

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bastion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bastion mean?

1. nounAn institution, place, or group seen as a strong defender of a particular value or way of life.
2. nounA projecting part of a fortification, typically angled to allow defenders to fire along the walls.

Bastion in a sentence

• The old university remained a bastion of traditional scholarship.

• The tourists climbed the stone bastion overlooking the harbour.

• The small library was the last bastion of quiet in a noisy town.

• Cannons were mounted on each corner bastion of the citadel.

Where does bastion come from?

Language of origin: French

The word travelled into English from French bastion, which the French had borrowed from the Italian bastione, an enlarged form of bastia meaning a fortress or earthwork. That Italian noun came from the verb bastire, 'to build', so a bastion was literally a 'built thing', a constructed defence. In military architecture it came to mean the angular projection at the corner of a fortress wall from which defenders could fire along the flanks. English took it up in the late 1500s as castle and siege engineering were keenly studied, and over time the concrete meaning softened into the familiar figurative one of any stronghold that protects a cause or value. The unexpected spelling trap is the middle: the -ti- is pronounced like 'ch', so writers tempted by 'bastian' or 'baschon' should remember the builder's root bastire.

How the word is built

• bastion (from Italian bastia: fortress/built defence)
• -on (augmentative noun ending)