steps

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of step.

   She measured the distance in steps rather than meters.

   Only a few steps separated the gate from the front door.

   Note

   A plural that carries every sense of step at once: paces taken, the treads of a stair or rungs of a ladder, the stages of a process. Context sorts them. The "board steps" in the American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897) are wooden treads to sit on, not paces. The same spelling is also the verb's present tense (she steps), and some meanings, like a flight of stairs, exist only in the plural.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of step.

   Whenever she steps into the room, the conversation stops.

   The guide steps ahead to check that the path is clear.

   Note

   The -s form covers every use of the verb: going a short way on foot, walking gravely or resolutely, dancing, and moving in the mind, as when a narrator steps back into memory. Most of these uses are intransitive and lean on a following word: steps into, steps ahead, steps aside. The rarer transitive use takes the foot itself as its object.

3. 3
   nouncountableplural

   A flight of stairs, especially one located outdoors.

   Worn marble steps led up to the courthouse entrance.

   He swept the leaves from the porch steps every fall morning.

   Similarstairs, staircase, stairway

4. 4
   nounplural

   The course or direction a person follows while walking.

   Disoriented in the fog, she retraced her steps to the trailhead.

   He bent his steps toward the harbor to catch the last ferry.

   Similarpath, way, course, route

   Note

   Always plural, and nearly always part of a set phrase: you follow in someone's steps, retrace your steps, bend your steps toward a place. The figurative use comes easily. To follow in a writer mother's steps is to take up her path in life, not to walk behind her down a road. Outside these fixed phrases, the literal sense of a walking course sounds bookish.

5. 5
   nounBritishplural

   A self-supporting folding ladder with flat treads and a hinged supporting frame; a stepladder.

   Mind you don't topple off the steps when you reach for that box.

   The decorator brought his own steps to reach the high cornice.

   Similarstepladder, ladder

   Note

   Household British for the folding ladder. It names one object but is always plural, so it takes a plural verb: the steps are in the shed. Outside British usage, stepladder is the safer word. Even in Britain, context does the work, since the same phrase could just as well mean an outdoor flight of stairs.

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