stairful

English

Etymology

From stair +‎ -ful.

Noun

stairful (plural stairfuls)

(uncommon) The amount that fills a staircase.
- 1929 November 1, A[lpheus] Hyatt Mayor, “A. Hyatt Mayor to Lincoln Kirstein”, in Mitzi Berger Hamovitch, editor, The Hound & Horn Letters, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, published 1982, →ISBN, chapter III (Dudley Fitts and A. Hyatt Mayor), page 92:
  And besides, Picasso starts out with loneliness and an effusion of pity, while Poussin starts out fierce: (that stairful of people who are handover-handing St. Erasmus’ warm entrails, like firemen passing the hose.)
- 1936 September, Fred Urquhart, “The Daft Woman in Number Seven”, in I Fell for a Sailor and Other Stories, Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, published 2011, →ISBN, page 196:
  Built in huge tenements of sixteen houses, one block was needed to accommodate an entire stairful of people from the condemned area.
- 1943, “Phi Taus Enter Inter-Society Activities”, in Mary Edith Kinnaman, editor, Illiwoco, Jacksonville, Ill.: The Junior Class, MacMurray College, →OCLC, page one hundred ten:
  Ann Rutledge lounge on Monday night—a whole stairful of Phi Tau’s.
- 1947, Olivia Howard Dunbar, “The Middle West in Flower”, in A House in Chicago, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, →OCLC, part I, page 21:
  Many years later Harriet recalled “one half day in my youth when I rode around in a jaunting car in Queenstown with a widower who was the father of a stairful of children, ten or twelve in number. […]”
- 1968, Otis L[ove] Guernsey, Jr., “The Arts Versus Most of the People All of the Time”, in John G. Kirk, editor, America Now, New York, N.Y.: Atheneum, →LCCN, section IV (American Culture), pages 230–231:
  Recently I observed him under attack by a quarrelsome press of numbers all talking at once; like Douglas Fairbanks opposing a stairful of swordsmen, still he held the ground with: “You may be a majority, but according to the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest, the majority is always obsolete.”
- 1969, Harriette Simpson Arnow, chapter 9, in The Weedkiller’s Daughter, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, published 1970, →ISBN, page 187:
  Movement had slowed, and again the stair was filled with groans and sighs; but for a different reason. Had the first traffic jam lasted a minute or so longer, the whole stairful would have been late to class; […]
- 1998, Steven Millhauser, “The Dream of the Consortium”, in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, New York, N.Y.: Crown Publishers, Inc., →ISBN, page 156:
  And on every level, at two widely separated places, elegant escalators trimmed in mahogany and brass rose up, while beside them, at an angle forming an X, stairfuls of customers floated to the floors below.
- 2007, Ramsey Campbell, “Omens”, in The Grin of the Dark, New York, N.Y.: Tor, published 2008 July, →ISBN, page 104:
  As I see daylight beyond the escalator, eight stairfuls of children trapped between two women sail past me.