Wikipedia
A dog-leg is a configuration of stairs between two floors of a building, often a domestic building, in which a flight of stairs ascends to a half-landing before turning 180 degrees and continuing upwards. The flights do not have to be equal, and frequently are not.
Structurally, the flights of a dog-leg stair are usually supported by the half-landing, which spans the adjoining flank walls.
From the design point of view, the main advantages of a dog-leg stair are:
- To allow an arrangement that occupies a shorter, though wider, floor area than a straight flight, and so is more compact. Even though the landings consume total floor space, there is no large single dimension.
- The upper floor is not directly visible from the bottom of the stairs, thereby providing more privacy.
- An object or person falling from the upper half of the stairs is likely to stop at the landing; this is safer than letting it fall all the way to the bottom.
Usage examples of "dog-leg".
It is a long harbour with a dog-leg in it and a precious narrow mouth protected by a broad mole and two batteries, one on each side, and another of 24-pounders high up on Bear: a tricky piece of navigation, to take a ship in or out with their infernal tramontane blowing right across the narrow mouth, but an excellent sheltered harbour inside with deep water up to the quays.
At about seventy-two hundred feet in elevation, where Highline dog-legged south, Anna turned north, traveling cross-country toward the glacial cirque below Cathedral Peak's south-southwestern slope.
The main gate was modernized about a century ago, with two defensive towers and a dog-leg.
For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs - the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses.
At first it seemed as if Smallwood was making some attempt to steer it, but it was obvious almost immediately that any such attempts were utterly useless: five tons of steel ran amok, it was completely out of control, skidding violently first to one side then the other, finally making a complete half-circle and sliding backward down the glacier at terrifying speed, following the slope of the ice which led from the right-hand side where we had been standing to the big nunataks thrusting up through the ice on the far left-hand corner of the dog-leg half-way down.
Access to these upper shelves was gained from balconies which, in their turn, were linked by an intricate arrangement of ramping walkways and stairways – straight stairways, spiralled stairways and strangely dog-legged stairways, all with uneven steps twisted by age and use and neglect.
It smelled of sweat and bad coffee and electronic components, and the sandbags in the dog-leg entrance were still ripped where a satchel charge--a stick grenade in a three-pound ball of plastique--had been thrown during the attack six months ago.
It smelled of sweat and bad coffee and electronic components, and the sandbags in the dog-leg entrance were still ripped where a satchel charge-a stick grenade in a three-pound ball of plastique-had been thrown during the attack six months ago.
It lies on the reef at the very edge of the only deep-water channel into the port: a devilish channel, narrow, with a double dog-leg and any number of banks and rocks in its bed.