stairful
stairful noun: the amount that fills a staircase.
Noun
stairful (plural stairfuls)
- The amount that fills a staircase.
- And besides, Picasso starts out with loneliness and an effusion of pity, while Poussin starts out fierce: (that stairful of people who are handover-handing St. Erasmus’ warm entrails, like firemen passing the hose.)1929 November 1, A[lpheus] Hyatt Mayor, “A. Hyatt Mayor to Lincoln Kirstein”, in Mitzi Berger Hamovitch, editor, The Hound & Horn Letters, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, published 1982...
- Built in huge tenements of sixteen houses, one block was needed to accommodate an entire stairful of people from the condemned area.1936 September, Fred Urquhart, “The Daft Woman in Number Seven”, in I Fell for a Sailor and Other Stories, Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, published 2011, →ISBN, page 196
Examples of stairful in a sentence
- Ann Rutledge lounge on Monday night—a whole stairful of Phi Tau’s.1943, “Phi Taus Enter Inter-Society Activities”, in Mary Edith Kinnaman, editor, Illiwoco, Jacksonville, Ill.: The Junior Class, MacMurray...
- Many years later Harriet recalled “one half day in my youth when I rode around in a jaunting car in Queenstown with a widower who was the father of a stairful of children, ten or twelve in number.[…]”1947, Olivia Howard Dunbar, “The Middle West in Flower”, in A House in Chicago, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, →OCLC, part I...
- Had the first traffic jam lasted a minute or so longer, the whole stairful would have been late to class; […]1969, Harriette Simpson Arnow, chapter 9, in The Weedkiller’s Daughter, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, published 1970, →ISBN, page 187:
- As I see daylight beyond the escalator, eight stairfuls of children trapped between two women sail past me.2007, Ramsey Campbell, “Omens”, in The Grin of the Dark, New York, N.Y.: Tor, published July 2008, →ISBN, page 104:
Forms of stairful
| plural | stairfuls |
|---|
Origin of stairful
From stair + -ful.
Questions about stairful
- What does stairful mean?
- Stairful means the amount that fills a staircase.
- How do you use stairful in a sentence?
- Ann Rutledge lounge on Monday night—a whole stairful of Phi Tau’s.
- What part of speech is stairful?
- Stairful is a noun.
- What is the plural of stairful?
- The plural of stairful is stairfuls.
Words near stairful in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stairful (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: “stairful.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stairful. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.