"riot stairs" meaning in English

See riot stairs in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: 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. Head templates: {{en-noun|p}} riot stairs pl (plural only)
  1. A flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them. Tags: plural, plural-only
    Sense id: en-riot_stairs-en-noun-tEY1YSAY Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English pluralia tantum

Download JSON data for riot stairs meaning in English (2.1kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "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.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "p"
      },
      "expansion": "riot stairs pl (plural only)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English pluralia tantum",
          "parents": [
            "Pluralia tantum",
            "Nouns",
            "Lemmas"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1994 December 14, Tim Gray, “The Myth of the Prison Builder”, in alt.folklore.college (Usenet)",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007 Fall, Jonathan Vincent, Danny Mayer, “Teaching radicalism from the university archives”, in Radical Teacher, number 79",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009, Douglas Reichert Powell, John Paul Tassoni, Composing Other Spaces, page 118",
          "text": "Walking the riot stairs and lounging on the wide lawn in front of Patterson Office Tower, our students could feel the continued presence of the state's reactive measures to a moment of student power organizing their own bodily movements 30 years later.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them."
      ],
      "id": "en-riot_stairs-en-noun-tEY1YSAY",
      "links": [
        [
          "disrupt",
          "disrupt"
        ],
        [
          "stride",
          "stride"
        ]
      ],
      "tags": [
        "plural",
        "plural-only"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "riot stairs"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "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.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "p"
      },
      "expansion": "riot stairs pl (plural only)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English pluralia tantum",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1994 December 14, Tim Gray, “The Myth of the Prison Builder”, in alt.folklore.college (Usenet)",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007 Fall, Jonathan Vincent, Danny Mayer, “Teaching radicalism from the university archives”, in Radical Teacher, number 79",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009, Douglas Reichert Powell, John Paul Tassoni, Composing Other Spaces, page 118",
          "text": "Walking the riot stairs and lounging on the wide lawn in front of Patterson Office Tower, our students could feel the continued presence of the state's reactive measures to a moment of student power organizing their own bodily movements 30 years later.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "disrupt",
          "disrupt"
        ],
        [
          "stride",
          "stride"
        ]
      ],
      "tags": [
        "plural",
        "plural-only"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "riot stairs"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.