doorknock

English

Etymology

From door +‎ knock.

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU):

  (file)

Noun

doorknock (plural doorknocks)

1. (Australia, New Zealand) A campaign of going from house to house knocking on doors, such as for a charity appeal.
   • 1981, Graham Jackson, Square Crib‎^[1], page 98:

     Sometimes they were raffles, mostly they were doorknocks. I went on one of the doorknocks after Wendy talked me into it.

   • 1995, John Montague Gurney, N. E. Renton, Successful Clubs, page 53:

     To run a doorknock you need volunteer collectors — lots of them. But because there are so many doorknocks each year, collectors are overloaded and it is difficult to recruit new ones.
     So what is the answer?

   • 2009 March 2, Holly Ife with AAP, “CFA and DSE warn of fires threatening Victoria, deny exaggeration”, in Herald Sun‎^[2], archived from the original on 6 March 2009:

     […] mobile phone providers have sent text messages to Victorian customers warning them of the conditions, in what has been described as an "electronic doorknock".

Verb

doorknock (third-person singular simple present doorknocks, present participle doorknocking, simple past and past participle doorknocked)

1. (chiefly Australia, New Zealand) To participate in a campaign of going from house to house knocking on doors; to knock on the door (of a house) during such a campaign.
   • 1979, Fatma Dharamsi, et al., Harlesden Community Project, Community Work And Caring For Children: A Community Project In An Inner City Local Authority, page 440,

     During the doorknocking local residents had talked about other issues.

   • 2007, Philip Hughes, Alan Black, Peter Kaldor, Building Stronger Communities, page 156:

     With some exceptions, doorknocking is likely to elicit a large number of small donations but relatively few large donations.

   • 2007, Robert Macklin, Kevin Rudd: The Biography, unnumbered page:

     ‘He doorknocked thirty-two thousand houses,’ Thérèse says. ‘I doorknocked with him at weekends. That′s one way to get fit, especially when every house that I doorknocked was high-set, but I took the formal period of the campaign off.’