corridor [L16th] Corridors are nothing to do with doors. They are ‘running places’. The word comes from Italian corridore, from Latin currere ‘to run’. It started out as a military term for a strip of land along the outer edge of a ditch, protected by a parapet. The modern sense of ‘a long passage in a building’ dates from the early 19th century. See also cursor. Corridors of power refers to the senior levels of government or the civil service, where all the important decision-making takes place behind the scenes. It was popularized by the title of C. P. Snow’s novel The Corridors of Power (1964), though Snow did not coin the expression.