What Is a Liminal Space? Meaning, Origin, and Real-World Examples

The Meaning of Liminal Space

A liminal space is an environment caught between two states — a hallway, a staircase, an escalator, a parking garage, the corridor before an airport gate. These are places designed to be passed through, not lingered in.

The important part is that the space itself isn't inherently strange. It's usually a completely familiar place: people walk through it, the lights are on, the signage works. What changes is that the moment the people and the everyday context disappear, the same familiar place suddenly feels foreign. That gap between "familiar" and "off" is exactly what the term liminal space is describing.

Origin: From the Latin Word for "Threshold"

The word "liminal" comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It started as an anthropology term: in 1909, French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep published Les rites de passage, describing rituals like coming-of-age ceremonies as having three stages — separation, a liminal (transitional) phase, and incorporation.

Anthropologist Victor Turner later expanded the concept in the 1960s, describing the liminal state as a suspended moment where a person is "no longer who they were, but not yet who they will become." What started as a term for psychological and social transitions was later borrowed by internet culture to describe a visual style of physical space — which is how we ended up with today's use of "liminal space."

Everyday Examples of Liminal Spaces

Liminal spaces aren't exotic or rare — they're all around us. Common examples include an empty shopping mall after closing, a train platform in the dead hours before the first or after the last train, a parking garage at night, a long hospital or hotel corridor, an office floor lit only by fluorescent lights with nobody in it, or a swimming pool before opening hours.

What they share is that they're normally full of people. An empty desert or mountain doesn't feel strange because it was never meant to be full — but a place that's usually bustling suddenly being silent creates a much stronger impression.

Why It Feels Unsettling

Looking at a liminal space photo, most people describe a strange feeling that isn't quite fear — more like discomfort. Researchers point to a mix of factors: a kind of "uncanny valley of architecture" where a familiar place feels subtly wrong, and the loss of the social cues that people normally provide, which we unconsciously read as signs of safety. We go into more depth on this in our article on why liminal spaces feel scary.

Liminal Spaces as Internet Culture

The way "liminal space" is used today traces back to a post on an internet forum around 2019. From there it spawned the Backrooms urban legend, spread through Reddit, Tumblr, and TikTok, and grew into a genuinely global trend. We cover this history in detail in our article on how liminal spaces became a trend.