Meanings
- pluralplural onlyA 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)2 more examples
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 79Walking 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.
2009, Douglas Reichert Powell, John Paul Tassoni, Composing Other Spaces, →ISBN, page 118
Origin
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.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
riot stairs. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/riot%20stairs
“riot stairs.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/riot%20stairs. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “riot stairs,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/riot%20stairs.
Source: riot stairs on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.