Buoy

1. n. A float; esp. a floating object moored to the bottom, to mark a channel or to point out the position of something beneath the water, as an anchor, shoal, rock, etc.
2. v. t. To keep from sinking in a fluid, as in water or air; to keep afloat; — with up.
3. v. t. To support or sustain; to preserve from sinking into ruin or despondency.
4. v. t. To fix buoys to; to mark by a buoy or by buoys; as, to buoy an anchor; to buoy or buoy off a channel.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.