buffet

noun

1. A counter or sideboard from which food and drinks are served or may be bought.

   “They stayed together during three dances, went out on to the terrace, explored wherever they were permitted to explore, paid two visits to the buffet, and enjoyed themselves much in the same way as if they had been school-children surreptitiously breaking loose from an assembly of grown-ups.”

2. Food laid out in this way, to which diners serve themselves.

   “We'll be serving supper buffet style.”

   “"We got a big buffet coming up soon. Bacon, eggs, fresh fruit you wouldn't believe."”

3. A small low stool; a hassock.
4. (countable)A blow or cuff with or as if with the hand, or by any other solid object or the wind.

   “On his cheek a buffet fell.”

   “October 30, 1795, Edmund Burke, letter to Lord Auckland those planks of tough and hardy oak that used for years to brave the buffets of the Bay of Biscay”

   “Kipper stood blinking, as I had sometimes seen him do at the boxing tourneys in which he indulged when in receipt of a shrewd buffet on some tender spot like the tip of the nose.”

5. (uncountable)The vibration of an aircraft when flying in or approaching a stall, caused by separation of airflow from the aircraft's wings.

verb

1. (transitive)To strike with a buffet; to cuff; to slap.

   “They spit in his face and buffeted him.”

2. (figuratively, transitive)To aggressively challenge, denounce, or criticise.

   “Is Burns obscure because he was gay and therefore ignorable until the Gay Rights Movement began? Or does he largely deserve his neglect? An answer requires that one examine not only Burns' books, but also the critical environment in which he was much buffeted — which, we are told, drove him to an early grave.”

   “Buffeted by criticism of his policy on Europe, battered by rebellion in the ranks over his bill to legalize same-sex marriage and wounded by the perception that he is supercilious, contemptuous and out of touch with mainstream Conservatism, Mr. Cameron earlier this week took the highly unusual step of sending a mass e-mail (or, as he called it, “a personal note”) to his party’s grass-roots members.”

3. To affect as with blows; to strike repeatedly; to strive with or contend against.

   “to buffet the billows”

   “The sudden hurricane in thunder roars, / Buffets the bark, and whirls it from the shores.”

   “[...] I buffetted heat and mosquetoes, and got the hay all up [...]”

   “You are lucky fellows who can live in a dreamland of your own, instead of being buffeted about the world—”

   “Atlantic gales constantly buffet Morwenstow, whose seven hamlets together constitute Cornwall's most northerly parish. The village is dotted with trees moulded into weird shapes by the wind, and above the trees rise the vicarage chimneystacks resembling miniature church towers.”

4. To deaden the sound of (bells) by muffling the clapper.
5. (intransitive)To struggle, contend; also in figurative or extended use: to move as if driven by force.

   “Again the chirpy tone did nothing to pacify the woman holding on to her ankles. Soon Zoe was buffeting back and forward through the hole.”