clout

IPA: kɫˈaʊt

(informal) Influence or effectiveness, especially political.
A blow with the hand.
(baseball, informal) A home run.
(archery) The center of the butt at which archers shoot; probably once a piece of white cloth or a nail head.
(regional, dated) A swaddling cloth.
(archaic) A cloth; a piece of cloth or leather; a patch; a rag.
(archaic) An iron plate on an axletree or other wood to keep it from wearing; a washer.
A clout nail.
(obsolete) A piece; a fragment.

To hit (someone or something), especially with the fist.
To cover with cloth, leather, or other material; to bandage, patch, or mend with a clout.
To stud with nails, as a timber, or a boot sole.
To guard with an iron plate, as an axletree.
To join or patch clumsily.
Dated form of clot. [(intransitive) To form a clot or mass.]

Examples of "clout" in Sentences

The industry's clout is more than financial, however.
You speculated how the word clout came to mean “to steal.”
Groups with a lot of members gain clout, but those groups also gain strife.
Bloomberg News CALCULATED RISK: Garanti Bankasi will provide a gateway for BBVA to gain clout in Turkey.
As cities around the U.S. struggle to raise money, a little-known financial-advisory firm has grown in clout and courted some controversy along the way.
The company's clout is so strong in the art community that they were able to request original works with the theme of the Pink Ribbon that signifies one's support of the many charities fundraising for the fight against breast cancer.
The Chinese military's political clout is expected to grow as the Communist Party's ruling Politburo Standing Committee — whose nine members are all civilians and don't include a foreign-policy specialist — prepares for China's change to new leadership in 2012.