shore up

English

Pronunciation

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Verb

shore up (third-person singular simple present shores up, present participle shoring up, simple past and past participle shored up)

1. (idiomatic, often figurative) To reinforce or strengthen (something at risk of failure).

   They hastened outside between storms to shore up the damaged fence.

   He needed something bold and dramatic to shore up his failing candidacy.

   I shored up a geranium with earth after it had flopped over.

   • 2011 October 20, Jamie Lillywhite, “Tottenham 1 - 0 Rubin Kazan”, in BBC Sport‎^[1]:

     Redknapp was determined to secure victory and sent on Younes Kaboul and star playmaker Luka Modric to shore things up.

Synonyms

• prop up

Translations

to reinforce (something at risk of failure)

• Dutch: versterken (nl), verstevigen (nl)
• Finnish: pönkittää
• French: renforcer (fr)
• German: abstützen (de), stützen (de), unterstützen (de), verstärken (de)
• Italian: puntellare
• Japanese: please add this translation if you can
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Mandarin: 支持 (zh) (zhīchí), 支撑 (zh) (zhīchēng)
• Maori: whakatete
• Russian: поддержа́ть (ru) n or pf (podderžátʹ)
• Serbo-Croatian: poduprijeti (sh), podupreti (sh), podržati (sh)
• Spanish: reforzar (es), apuntalar (es)
• Turkish: desteklemek (tr), payanda vurmak (tr)

References

• “shore”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Anagrams

• Orpheus, uphroes, upshore