Stairway

How to spell stairway

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stairway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stairway mean?

1. nounA flight of steps and its surrounding structure, leading from one level of a building to another.

Stairway in a sentence

• The narrow stairway creaked under the weight of the moving crew.

• A wide marble stairway led up to the hotel lobby.

Where does stairway come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stairway is a native English compound, built from two old Germanic words. The first element, 'stair', comes from the Old English stǣger, which traces back to a root meaning 'to climb' or 'to mount', the same idea that underlies the verb 'to stair' in its oldest sense. The second element, 'way', comes from the Old English weg, meaning a road, path, or course of travel, a word with relatives across the Germanic languages such as the German Weg. Joined together, the compound names a path made of steps, and it has been used in this plain, literal way since at least the seventeenth century. Because both halves are ordinary everyday words, the spelling is regular; the only thing to fix in memory is that it is one solid word, 'stairway', not two, and that it begins with 'stair' (the steps) rather than the soundalike 'stare'.

How the word is built

• stair (a flight of steps, from Old English stǣger)
• way (a path or route, from Old English weg)