Corridor

Corridor is one of the 117 mis-spellings listed as 'Common difficulties' in the section on 'Spelling' within 'Writing' in UEfAP. It is spelled correctly here, with two '-r-'s in the middle and one '-r' at the end; there is only one '-d-'.

• A corridor is a 'passage', in normal use nowadays always indoors. Formerly, it was also applied to arcades and cloisters round courtyards, and also to covered ways around fortifications. It may be worthwhile explaining some figurative meanings to users of AWE:
  • In political history, a corridor is a narrow strip of territory connecting two separate larger territories. The Danzig (or Polish) Corridor, a casus belli in 1939, was a strip of land awarded to Poland by the Versailles Treaty of 1919 to connect the otherwise land-locked country with the Baltic Sea (at the port of Danzig - Gdansk in Polish); the Jerusalem Corridor was a similar strip of land guaranteeing access from the new state of Israel to its territories in Jerusalem in 1949; the Wakhan Corridor, set up as a buffer between the British and Russian Empires in Afghanistan at the end of the nineteenth century, may also serve as a route between China and Afghanistan, although it remains a primitive walk through the mountains.
  • In environmental studies, planning and so on, a green corridor has a similar function: it allows separate populations of a species to have contact with each other, or with different resources: railway embankments often provide a green corridor for deer and other grazing animals to move from their homes in countryside to nocturnal grazing in suburban gardens.
  • In railway trains, corridor carriages ('corridor cars' in American English) were carriages in which passengers travelled in separate compartments. Access around the train was through corridors or passageways which ran from end to end of the carriage. (Though these seem quaintly old-fashioned now, they must have been a great improvement on the old system where once passengers had entered a compartment, they had to stay in it until the next station.
  • An air corridor is a designated route for aircraft flying over a particular region, or through particular airspace. It is designed to protect friendly aircraft from being identified as hostile, and therefore being attacked.
  • The figurative phrase 'the corridors of power' is used for informal and often covert contacts with high levels of administration and government; it carries connotations of 'whispering', 'behind the scenes' and 'man-to-man' negotiation. The image is of the long corridors in Westminster Ministries and offices. See also lobby. The phrase was popularized by its use by C.P.Snow as the title of his novel The Corridors of Power (1964); he first used it in Homecomings (1956), although he did not invent it.

Don't confuse corridor (pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, 'CORR-i-door', IPA: /('kɒ rɪ ,dɔː(or ə)^r/) with the Spanish word, adopted into English, corrida, pronounced with the stress on the second vowel, which is a long -i-: 'korr-EE-da',/kɒ 'riː ,da/. In its own language, the '-d-' is sounded more like the 'th-' of 'the': /ð/. The corrida (in full corrida de toros. 'running of the bulls') is the local name for what in English is more usually called a 'bullfight'.

It is one of the curiosities of etymology that, when schoolteachers are in the habit of insisting that children 'should not run in the corridors', the word itself comes from the Italian corridoio. meaning in origin 'running place'. Corrida shares the origin, ultimately the Latin currere, Italian correre.