Can we say a door is slammed open?

”Slamming open the door”.

In British English, does the phrase denote a flung open door that slams into something? Or, does the phrase’s meaning stretch to violently opened doors in general?

Solution 1:

I have never heard of a door being "slammed open" - it sounds entirely non-idiomatic to me.

The principal use of slam - per the OED is in shutting. To shut (a door, window, etc.) with violence and noise; to bang; to close with unnecessary force. Also with adverbs, as down, to, up.

There are however idiomatic figurative uses such as slam on the brakes, though slam almost always carries the connotation of noise and/or violent action - such as the car slammed into the one in front.

Solution 2:

A trick that everyone abhors in little girls is slamming doors. A wealthy banker's little daughter Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater, by name Rebecca Offendort, was given to this furious sport. She would deliberately go and slam the door like billy-ho to make her uncle Jacob start. ...

The point of this extract from Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales is that the standard usage of 'slam' in the context of doors is that it describes the violent and noisy shutting of them. This usually happens at the end of a bad tempered argument, to which one party tries to put a victorious end by leaving the room with a final insult and shutting the door with a violent bang made by the edge of the door crashing into the door frame.

Opening a door with a loud bang is rather more difficult, because it has to move though up to 180 degrees before it can hit a wall, and so needs to be on very well-oiled hinges. Or it has to be in the corner of a room so that the door handle can violently strike the adjacent wall, denting the plaster. Eve then the noise is nowhere near as loud and satisfying.

Moreover, why would anyone slam a door open? Perhaps to start a row? That is possible. If so the author is using the irregular usage for dramatic effect. For the reason I have explained, the standard expression for the violent treatment of doors is to fling them open and slam them shut. The writer might be aiming at a dramatic effect by using slam open: using the opposite word from that expected will certainly grab a reader's attention. Whether the reader's reaction is to be more gripped by the drama or distracted by a slightly strange usage depends entirely on what follows the unconventional usage. And this we do not have.