corridor
Pluralcorridors
- 1A narrow hall or passage inside a building or train car, with rooms or compartments opening off it.
She hurried down the corridor to reach the meeting room on time.
Each compartment opened onto the corridor that ran the length of the sleeping car.
Similarhallway, passage, passageway, hall
Note
The building sense still carries its Italian origin: corridore, a long passage, from correre, "to run." English borrowed it through French, and the root suits a space made for moving through rather than lingering in. The word is just as much at home on trains, where the corridor runs past the compartments. Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) sends a passenger briskly down one to his table in the dining car.
- 2A restricted strip of land set aside to allow passage between two separated places.
Aid groups negotiated a corridor so supplies could reach the besieged town.
The treaty granted the landlocked nation a corridor to the sea.
Note
Railways gave this sense one of its sharpest uses: a line that crosses another country's ground with its trains "sealed" along the way. Brian Reed's "An Austro-German 'Corridor' Line" in Railway Magazine (1951) describes Austrian trains running from Innsbruck to Reutte by way of Garmisch-Partenkirchen on just those terms. The idea at the heart of the word is passage without access. The route belongs to the journey, not to the land it crosses.
- 3The land lying alongside an important road, river, or railway line.
Developers eyed the rail corridor for new housing projects.
Wildlife struggles to cross the busy corridor that follows the river.
Note
The word usually attaches to the name of the route it lines: a Main Street corridor, the Pike-Pine Corridor in Seattle. When it becomes part of a place name, it is capitalized along with the rest. Otherwise it stays lowercase after the street or road it follows. Either way, it marks out a stretch of land defined by the route running through it rather than by any boundary of its own.
- 4
Less common meaning
- 5A covered way running around the whole outer line of a place's fortifications.
Defenders hurried around the corridor to reinforce the threatened bastion.
The engineers laid out the corridor to ring the entire fortress.
Note
Here the word belongs to the vocabulary of fortification, and you will meet it mainly in historical writing about sieges and defenses. Unlike the indoor passage with rooms opening off it, this corridor rings the outside of the works. It is rare even in older military prose, so a reader should let context confirm the meaning. Covered way is the usual name for the same thing.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from French corridor, from Italian corridore meaning "long passage," which comes from correre, "to run."