A door is a movable structure used to open and close an entrance, typically consisting of a panel that swings on hinges or that slides or spins inside a space.
When open, doors admit people, animals, ventilation, and light. The door is used to control the physical atmosphere within a space by enclosing the air drafts, so that interiors may be more effectively heated or cooled. Doors are significant in preventing the spread of fire. They act as a barrier to noise. Most doors are equipped with locking mechanisms to allow entrance to certain people and keep out others.
Doors are used to screen areas of a building for aesthetics, keeping formal and utility areas separate. Doors also have an aesthetic role in creating an impression of what lies beyond. Doors are often symbolically endowed with ritual purposes, and the guarding or receiving of the keys to a door, or being granted access to a door can have special significance. Similarly, doors and doorways frequently appear in metaphorical or allegorical situations, literature and the arts, often as a portent of change.
Read more about Door: Applications, Design and Styles, History, Door-related Accidents
Famous quotes containing the word door:
“Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air
Sees down the street,
And in the camera of my eye depicts
Row-houses and row-lives:
Glass after glass, door after door the same,”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)