[f. TRAP sb.1 + DOOR.] A door, either sliding or moving on hinges, and flush with the surface, in a floor, roof, or ceiling, or in the stage of a theater.
c. 1374. Chaucer, Troylus, III. 710 (759). ‘Which weye be ye comen…?’ Quod she…. ‘Here at þis secre trappe dore,’ quod he.
1489–90. Rec. St. Mary at Hill, 155. For viij ffoote di. tymber for o trapp dorr.
1579–80. North, Plutarch (1595), 1092. Aristippus … locked himself … in a litle high chamber with a trappe dore, and set his bed vpon it, and so slept.
1599. Sandys, Europæ Spec. (1632), 97. They have their trap doores or pit-falls in darke melancholy chambers.
1704. S. Sewall, Diary, 12 Sept. Mrs. Tuthill falls through a Trap Door into the cellar.
1774. Pennant, Tour Scot. in 1772, 93. The trap-door in the floor, contrived for the lowering in of the captives.
1840. Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop, xxxv. Getting on the roof of the house through the trap-door.
b. transf. and fig.
1648. Gage, West Ind., 82. Never to go to those parts, which were but snares and trap-dores to let down to hell.
1694. Motteux, Rabelais, IV. xxxiv. 136. It no more open’d its Guttural Trap-door.
1860. P. P. Carpenter, in Rep. Smithsonian Instit. 1859, 206, note. The operculum is a horny or shelly appendage to the end of the foot…. It may be called … the trap-door or toe-nail.
1869. J. Martineau, Ess., II. 94. The trap-door of some hidden paradox.
c. Mining. A door in a level for directing the ventilating current; a weather-door.
1851. Greenwell, Coal-trade Terms Northumb. & Durh., 54. Trapper, a little boy whose employment consists in opening and shutting a trap-door when required.
1883. Gresley, Coal Mining Gloss., Trap-door, a small door, kept locked, fixed in a stopping or bolt, for giving access to firemen and certain others to the return air-ways, dams, or other disused places in a mine.
1886. J. Barrowman, Sc. Mining Terms, 68.
d. Comb. Trap-door spider, one of a group of large spiders, which make a nest in the shape of a tube with a hinged lid that opens and shuts like a trap-door; hence trap-door nest, etc.
1826. Kirby & Sp., Entomol., III. xxxiv. 492. The trapdoor or mason spider (Mygale cæmentaria).
1864–5. Wood, Homes without H., vi. (1868), 116. Of all the burrowing spiders … none is so admirable an excavator as the Trap-door Spider of Jamaica [Cteniza].
1883. Pall Mall G., 29 Dec., 5/1. The trap-door spider is almost the typical natural curiosity of the Riviera.
1897. Anne Page, Afternoon Ride, 58. The … spider, decoyed out of his well-built trap-door nest.
