Definition of "buckram" [buck•ram]

• A coarse cotton fabric heavily sized with glue, used for stiffening garments and in bookbinding. (noun)
• Archaic Rigid formality. (noun)
• Resembling or suggesting buckram, as in stiffness or formality: "a wondrous buckram style” ( Thomas Carlyle). (adjective)
• To stiffen with or as if with buckram. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Linen cloth observed through a microscope which magnifies the threads to a coarseness of about forty to the inch gives us the exact appearance of the buckram, which is a heavy, strong cloth well adapted to large books, and which furnishes the most durable binding of all the book cloths."
• "The structures it is true tend a little too much of what may be termed buckram and fustian styles; indeed there is scarcely a form or a detail which an architect would care to jot down in his note-book."
• "The coarse, heavy, plain-woven linen or cotton material known as buckram today is used for stiffening, etc."