stairful

noun

1. (uncommon)The amount that fills a staircase.

   “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.)”

   “Built in huge tenements of sixteen houses, one block was needed to accommodate an entire stairful of people from the condemned area.”

   “Ann Rutledge lounge on Monday night—a whole stairful of Phi Tau’s.”

   “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.[…]””

   “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.””