stair
Pluralstairs
- 1A series of steps leading from one level of a building to another; a staircase.
A narrow stair led up to the cramped attic room.
She climbed the stairs two at a time to answer the door.
Similarstaircase, stairway, steps
Note
Here the singular names a whole flight, as in Hughes Mearns's Antigonish (1899): "Yesterday, upon the stair / I met a man who wasn't there." One stair is the entire ascent, not a single step. The plural stairs can name the same flight (she climbed the stairs), so when the singular appears, context decides whether the reader pictures one tread or the whole staircase.
- 2A single one of the steps that together make up a staircase.
The bottom stair had worn smooth after decades of use.
She left a candle burning on the third stair while she searched upstairs.
Similarstep
Note
The word for one step carries its origin openly. Old English stǣġer goes back to an Indo-European root meaning "to walk, climb," and its Germanic ancestor covered stairs and scaffolding alike. Step is the everyday synonym, but stair is the narrower word. A step can be cut into a hillside or set before a door, while a stair always belongs to a staircase.
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Origin
From Middle English steire, from Old English stǣġer ("stair, staircase"), going back through Proto-Germanic *staigriz ("stairs, scaffolding") to a Proto-Indo-European root *steygʰ- ("to walk, climb"). It is related to Dutch steiger and German Stiege ("a flight of stairs").