Wiktionary

staircase

See also: stair-case

English edit

 
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A spiral staircase.

Alternative forms edit

Etymology edit

stair +‎ case

Pronunciation edit

  • Hyphenation: stair‧case

Noun edit

staircase (plural staircases)

  1. A flight of stairs; a stairway.
    • 2011, “13 Candles”, performed by Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats:
      I was on the staircase by the bell / Blinded by the black magician's spell
  2. A connected set of flights of stairs; a stairwell.
    • 1914, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter III, in Nobody, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 1915, →OCLC:
      Turning back, then, toward the basement staircase, she began to grope her way through blinding darkness, but had taken only a few uncertain steps when, of a sudden, she stopped short and for a little stood like a stricken thing, quite motionless save that she quaked to her very marrow in the grasp of a great and enervating fear.
    • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 19, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
      When Timothy and Julia hurried up the staircase to the bedroom floor, where a considerable commotion was taking place, Tim took Barry Leach with him. He had him gripped firmly by the arm, since he felt it was not safe to let him loose, and he had no immediate idea what to do with him.
  3. A set of locks (enclosed sections of waterway) mounted one above the next.

Derived terms edit

Translations edit

Verb edit

staircase (third-person singular simple present staircases, present participle staircasing, simple past and past participle staircased)

  1. (transitive) To modify (a signal, a graph, etc.) to reduce a smooth curve to a series of discrete steps.
    • 2006, Nikos Paragios, Yunmei Chen, Olivier D. Faugeras, editors, Handbook of Mathematical Models in Computer Vision, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 26:
      This leads to much smoother reconstructions in regions of moderate gradient and thus prevents staircasing.
  2. (real estate) To increase one's share in a co-ownership.
    • 2018, Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace, Ownership, Narrative, Things, Springer, →ISBN, page 139:
      It is a good idea to make plans for staircasing when you first buy your shared ownership home.

See also edit

Anagrams edit

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