English edit

Noun edit

elevator shaft (plural elevator shafts)

  1. (Canada, US) Synonym of liftshaft
    • 1979, The Boomtown Rats (lyrics and music), “Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)”, in The Fine Art of Surfacing:
      You know when winter comes to visit these big cities and / the wind starts howling through the elevator shafts
    • 2019 June 1, Oliver Wainwright, “Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian[1], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 5 October 2020:
      Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds.