Stairs and Steps

I was brought up to call the cement or concrete front steps (or steps from the ground up to the back door, or the back veranda) were just steps.  Indide the house, steps to the upper floors, if any, were stairs.  If they were enclosed, they would be a staircase.

But I'm hearing people calling the front steps stairs, which is a new one on me.  Stairs are always wooden, and inside.  Outside, they're stone or concrete, and called steps.  In our town, it's possible to buy a complete flight of concrete steps for the front of your house from a garden center; a flight of five step, usually. 

But two things confuse the whole issue: firstly, some people have wooden steps for the front of their house; we do, because our front porch veranda is a little higher than usual, so an extra step is needed, or each step has to be a little taller.  Still, nobody has called our front steps stairs; they wouldn't do that unless we started doing it.

Secondly, fire escapes.   These things have metal steps, and lots of them.  So what to call them: steps or stairs?  Well, neither.  The term stairs is usually not used unless they lead from one level of a house to another, and it's a permanent installation, and it's indoors.  Fire escapes being outdoors, wouldn't be called steps.  The individual steps are certainly still steps.  But the whole flight of steps, indoors, would be stairs. 

Fire escapes can only be called that: fire escapes.  If a house has fixed outside stairs to access an upper level, they'd be called outside stairs sometimes.  You see this in homes where the upstairs part has been rented separately. 

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