Other forms: escalators
An escalator is the moving staircase in shops and stations. Take the escalator, the escalator is broken, up the escalator.
In Britain the convention on the Underground is to stand on the right and walk on the left, and it is enforced by everybody except tourists. A moving walkway is the flat version. Note escalate and escalation, which were back-formed from escalator and are now far commoner than it — the machine named the verb rather than the other way round, which is unusual.
1nounescalatorA moving staircase in a shop or station.
“The escalator has been broken since about March.”
escalator is a moving staircase.
Escalator was a trade name coined in about 1900 from escalade, meaning to scale a wall, plus the -ator of elevator. It lost its trade mark protection and became an ordinary word, and English then cut escalate out of the middle of it.
Latin
ex- — from, out of
English, today
escalator
Built from
By genericization from the former trademark Escalator, created by American inventor Charles Seeberger in 1900, from Latin ex- (“from, out of”) + scala (“ladder”) + -tor, which forms nouns of agency; see the appendix. Broader usage may be influenced by its derivative escalate, by surface analysis, escalate + -or. For an alternative etymology, see the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA