stairs

UK/ˈstɛəz/US/ˈstɛɹz/

nounA1Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,331 of 15,258leans spoken

Stairs are the steps you climb to go from one floor to another. A flight of them, with a rail at the side.

The word is almost always plural, and the singular stair is used mainly in poetry or in a phrase like the bottom stair. The structure as a whole is a staircase or a stairway, and the flat bit at the top is the landing. English says upstairs and downstairs as single words, and below stairs once meant the servants' part of a house. A spiral staircase turns as it climbs.

Definitions of stairs

1nounstairsA set of steps leading from one floor to another.A1
“She ran down the stairs two at a time.”

Also accepted in games: staircase

Practised in Around the House, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

stairs in the wild

Nicknamed the Stairs of Mourning, the stairs are infamous in Roman history as a place of execution.
Gemonian stairs
The stairs were originally known as the Boulevard steps, the Giant Staircase, or the Richelieu steps.
Potemkin Stairs
To protect hamsters, owners may place hamster balls on the lower level of their house, away from any stairs.
Hamster ball
Some owners also create a simple barrier near the stairs, so that they will not roll down the stairs.
Hamster ball
Before the Exorcist association, the stairs were informally called "Hitchcock steps" for famed suspense and horror film director Alfred Hitchcock.
Exorcist steps

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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