as in stronghold
a structure or place from which one can resist attack
the boys built a snow fortress and then challenged the neighborhood kids to an in-your-face snowball fight
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Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of fortress
Companies are creating cash cushions — also known as fortress balance sheets — to protect themselves from a possible downturn.
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Los Angeles Times, 1 Jan. 2026
Once again, no criminal has tried to enter my fortress.
—Meghana Indurti, New Yorker, 1 Jan. 2026
Known as the Fortress Revenue Collection Lab, the building does look startlingly like a fortress—with barbed wire, barred windows, brick walls, and a central tower.
—Matteo Wong, The Atlantic, 31 Dec. 2025
The site was founded in the late Hellenistic period, between the second and first centuries BC, when it was used as a fortress.
—Andrea Margolis, FOXNews.com, 30 Dec. 2025
See All Example Sentences for fortress
Recent Examples of Synonyms for fortress
Noun
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McDonald said DeSantis also could be trying to shore up Republican strongholds to mitigate the losses generally experienced by the party in power during midterm elections.—
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Campbell’s main support always came from the union stronghold of Pueblo, in southern Colorado.—
Noun
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The area was once a citadel complex in the time of King Herod, who ruled from 37 to 5 B.C. after he was appointed king of Judea by the Romans.—
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The sprawling citadel — complete with towers, walls and barracks — was discovered at the Tel el-Kharouba archaeological site in the Sinai Peninsula, according to an Oct. 11 news release from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.—
Noun
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In September 2023, in the middle of the Northumberland night, a mechanic named Adam Carruthers cut down a sycamore tree more than a century old that stood in a gap along an especially picturesque section of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman fortification that runs across the narrowest part of England.—
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Passmore’s magisterial, revisionist account of the Maginot Line—the network of French fortifications built in the 1920s and 1930s to stop a German invasion—challenges the conventional understanding of its role in World War II.—
Noun
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Outside of showing us the Secret Traitor’s handwriting on their shortlists, there were no tells from the production team about who this person could be, just shadowy footage of some hooded player wandering the castle with a lantern.—
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After the cast gathered outside the castle, host Alan Cumming selected one player in plain sight to take on the role.—
Noun
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Catania’s Palazzo Biscari (a bastion of Rococo glory) occupies an entire block of the volcanic-stone city and is still occupied by descendants of the Biscari family.—
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Well, Orange County certainly had this reputation for so long as the conservative bastion, going back to not only the Klan days and then the John Birch Society after that.—
Noun
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Our chairs are for sitting on, not for constructing elaborate forts.—
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The steady flow of packages into our New York and London beauty closets alone could create a cardboard box fort or two.—
Cite this Entry
“Fortress.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/fortress. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.
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