riot stairs
riot stairs noun: a flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them.
Noun
riot stairs pl (plural only)
- A flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them.
- It is slightly believable because the stairs are all riot stairs. In other words the stairs are all diagonal so if you walk straight up them you run into a wall.1994 December 14, Tim Gray, “The Myth of the Prison Builder”, in alt.folklore.college (Usenet)
- The construction of riot stairs and observational offices at the University of Kentucky as pre-emptive measures aimed at diffusing future dissent proved more stimulating to dialogue than, say, a topic like "repression" or "authority" in the generic register.2007 Fall, Jonathan Vincent, Danny Mayer, “Teaching radicalism from the university archives”, in Radical Teacher, number 79
Origin of riot stairs
Coined for the construction of such stairways on university campuses in response to student unrest during the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to prevent mobs of students from running together.
Questions about riot stairs
- What does riot stairs mean?
- Riot stairs means a flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them.
- What part of speech is riot stairs?
- Riot stairs is a noun.
Words near riot stairs in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: riot stairs (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “riot stairs.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/riot_stairs. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.