Trapdoor
What is Trapdoor?
A trapdoor is a door set into a floor or ceiling. Primitively, trapdoors were sack traps in mills, and provide the sacks to pass up by the mill while naturally falling back to a closed position. Trapdoors are commonly featured in cartoons as a slapstick comic effect. Trapdoor spiders dig out an underground nest they line with their silk, and then top it with a hinged lid.
Hidden trapdoors at times appear in fiction, either as entrances to secret passageways, or as literal traps into which a dependent pedestrian may fall if he or she happens to stand on one. Most 19th- and 20th Century gallows featured a trapdoor, usually with two flaps. The victim was placed at the join. The edge of a trapdoor farthest from the hinge accelerates faster than gravitation, so that the victim does not hit the flaps but falls freely.
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