doors

1. 1
   nounplural

   Plural of door.

   Workers fitted soundproof doors throughout the recording studio.

   Strong winds rattled the doors all night long.

   Note

   A regular plural with a habit of its own: counted out, doors can stand for the houses behind them, so a neighbor three doors down lives three houses away. The same spelling is also a verb form, the cycling-collision verb. A driver who doors a cyclist and a hallway with two doors are told apart only by the sentence around them.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of door.

   Under the new city ordinance, anyone who doors a cyclist faces a steep fine.

   A driver who doors a passing cyclist may have to pay for the rider's injuries.

   Note

   The verb always takes an object, and that object is the person who gets hit: a driver doors a cyclist, a passenger doors a pedestrian. The subject is whoever swung the door open, not the door itself. It shares its spelling with the plural noun, but only the verb needs someone on the receiving end.

3. 3
   noununcountableplural

   The time at which a venue opens its entrance to admit an audience, especially before a concert or performance.

   The flyer listed doors at eight and the headliner at ten.

   Fans lined up an hour before doors to claim spots near the stage.

   Similaropening

   Note

   Live-event talk uses this as shorthand for a moment rather than an object, and it stays plural even then: doors are at six, the show's at seven. It takes at for the clock time and before or after for the wait, and it is always set against the later start of the show. The Onion Book of Known Knowledge (2012) puts it in a plea about a faulty loudspeaker: "It's 10 minutes before doors."

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