Dancers - meaning stairs

[the new blue]

Hi does anyone know the origin of the term "dancers", meaning stairs, or any infor on it at all? Many thanks

[crisgal]

dancing bears - stairs

my dad always used to tell us to get up the dancers!

[the new blue]

So did mine ... !! But why ....??!

[Naomicorlett]

I guess the same as " apples and pears " rhyming slang. In our family it was " Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire "

[Maggoty]

We knew them as "Fred Astaires" hence dancers

xx

[Quizmonster]

The earliest recorded use of the word dancers to mean stairs dates back to the 1670s, which - I would suggest - predates the age of rhyming slang and certainly the age of cinematic hoofers!

[fredpuli47]

Obviously in 1670 everyone understood that dancers meant anything with a lot of steps,QM

[fredpuli47]

The expression in 1671, and repeated in later citations, in the Oxford English Dictionary is " to track up the dancers" meaning "to go up the stairs" but no explanation for dancers being used in this way is given.It is simply "slang".It sounds humorous, that going up the stairs is akin to dancing.

[Quizmonster]

That was my point, Fred. I really wanted to dispel the notion that it had anything at all to do with Cockney rhyming slang and that any explanation dependent on that was a bit of a 'back-formation'. That is, the word came first and the imaginary 'explanations' were created much later to fit it.

[Denizen]

Dancing stairs is an architectural term to define a particular type of stairway design.

They are a spiral, or part of a spiral staircase where the focus of each step does not rotate about a common centre but 'dances' around the central focus.