stairful

plural stairfuls

1. uncommonThe amount that fills a staircase.

   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 College, →OCLC, page one hundred ten

   5 more examples

   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, →ISBN, chapter III (Dudley Fitts and A. Hyatt Mayor), page 92

   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

   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, page 21

   Recently I observed him under attack by a quarrelsome press of numbers all talking at once; like Douglas Fairbanks opposing a stairful of swordsmen, still he held the ground with: “You may be a majority, but according to the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest, the majority is always obsolete.”

   1968, Otis L[ove] Guernsey, Jr., “The Arts Versus Most of the People All of the Time”, in John G. Kirk, editor, America Now, New York, N.Y.: Atheneum, →LCCN, section IV (American Culture), pages 230–231

   Movement had slowed, and again the stair was filled with groans and sighs; but for a different reason. 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