Stairs

How to spell stairs

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stairs

What does stairs mean?

1. nounA set of steps leading from one level of a building to another.

Stairs in a sentence

• She carried the heavy box up the stairs to the spare room.

• The lift was broken, so everyone took the stairs to the third floor.

Where does stairs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English stǣger, meaning 'a staircase' or 'a flight of steps', which in turn came from the Germanic root staigri- linked to the verb stigan, 'to climb' or 'to ascend'. That same climbing root is the ancestor of words like 'stile' (the steps over a fence) and is distantly related to the German steigen, 'to climb'. For centuries 'stair' could mean a single step, but English speakers increasingly treated the plural 'stairs' as the natural name for the whole flight, which is why we so rarely say 'a stair' today. The spelling trap is purely sonic: 'stairs' sounds exactly like 'stares', the verb of looking fixedly, yet the two share no etymological connection at all. Keeping the 'air' spelling, the same one inside 'air' and 'chair', is the surest way to land on the steps rather than the gaze.

How the word is built

• stair (a step, from Old English stǣger 'staircase')
• -s (plural)