sustains

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of sustain.

   The old bridge still sustains heavy traffic across the river each day.

   Hope sustains the survivors through the worst weeks of the famine.

   Note

   The -s form carries every sense of the verb, and nearly all of them take a direct object: a bridge sustains traffic, food sustains life, evidence sustains a claim. In court it means accepting an objection or motion as valid, as in the judge sustains the objection. Injuries work differently. A player who sustains a knee injury suffers it and does not keep it going.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of sustain.

   The synthesizer produced rich, glassy sustains that lingered after each chord.

   Engineers compared the sustains of several guitar pickups during the test.

   Note

   A musician's plural: the singular names a mechanism for holding a note, like a piano's right pedal, so sustains can be counted and compared, as with the sustains of two guitar pickups. The same spelling is also the everyday verb form, and only the sentence tells them apart. In the pedal sustains the chord it is a verb; after a determiner, as in the sustains, it is the noun.

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