Motte
//ˈmɒt//
"Motte" in a Sentence (4 examples)
Fascism is the motte to capitalism's bailey.
The motte was a mound made of earth and surrounded by a ditch.
Coordinate term: bailey
"Birds are dinosaurs" is the bailey; "birds are more similar to dinosaurs than anything else" is the motte.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.