I learned this when I was a wee lad: I was playing Runescape and trying to solve a quest I was stuck on with a walkthrough. The guide said that the macguffin was on the first floor of some building, and I must have spent hours looking on the ground floor with no luck.
I finally asked my big brother for help and he said, "Have you tried looking upstairs?"
And there it was, blew my mind.
Dude, I had the same problem, but with a clue scroll! I cannot tell you how long I spent searching the bottom floor of buildings around the Ardougne square...
In the US we use either 1st floor and Ground floor to refer to the same floor. The second and higher floors are consistently named though, except for those buildings that skip the 13th floor.
Singapore is even more bonkers because they have eastern and western superstitions to accommodate, plus it's a really densely-built island so tall buildings are extremely common.
Not always, nothing like the US and inconsistency, I work in the northeast US on a college campus our buildings have G-1-2-3....even the newer buildings follow it.
When your country is made of tiny countries (states) with comparable sizes and populations to European countries there are always going to be exceptions.
It would be if you did it in the US, where everybody knows the ground floor is the first floor. Here in Europe, it's just taught that way from birth, so everybody knows that the first floor is above ground and there's no confusion.
It makes perfect sense if you learn it that way! It's hardly asinine in any case. I don't think it's ever caused a problem, except for Americans in Europe getting confused by it or vice versa.
How many floors do you count in a two storey house? Do you have ground + 1 floor, or so you have a house with a floor in top of the ground and a floor up the stairs?
If you have two floors, you can one the first and the other "second floor"
Exactly. In most countries, you reason that you never need to count floors unless you are going up or down. If you are walking up stairs, each floor you go past, you count it: F1, F2, F3, etc. If you are walking down stairs, you count each floor you go past: B1, B2, B3, etc.
Americans think about it more like a cake. Each "story" or "floor" is a ~3m or 4m, floor-to-ceiling, architectural layer. You don't look at a 3-layer cake and say "that cake has a ground layer, then a first layer and a second layer" you say "that cake has three layers".
Fortunately a 3 story building has the same number of floors (although numbered differently) in both continents; or we’d truly be in an architectural pickle.
So I'm on the top floor of a 2 story house (floor 1 in British). You're on the ground floor. Would you say that I'm "up on the first floor" if someone asked where I was? That seems very weird to me.
Essentially, yes. All of the surface of planet earth is ground level to us, whether a building exists there or not. You would then be on the first (man made) floor above the ground. Even a tent has a ground floor. Think of the ground as zero. Anything above counts upwards. Anything below downwards.
You start counting with 1. If you're counting floors, where you enter the building you step on floor #1 and walking upstairs you land on floor# 2. Just like how there isn't a year 0 because we count the amount of time passed. You count the number of floors traveled.
Agreed. Go outside and count the concentric rings that go upwards. Do you ever start with 0 counting anything else in existence???? No it's 1 or L but #2 is 2.
Americans always focus on facades, and think about buildings as commodities. The logic is that in the American conception, each floor is a floor-to-ceiling architectural layer, as viewed from the front of a building. So you think:
B2 - Second layer below visibility
B1 - First layer below visibility
1 - First visible layer
2 - Second visible layer
3 - Third visible layer
"How many layers am I paying for, when I buy this building? Sir, If you buy 7 layers at this low, low price. I will throw in an 8th layer for free!" "OMG did you hear Frank's new house has 4 layers! Frank has way more status than Bob and his paltry two layer building."
Whereas in most countries, the conception is that a floor is each literal floor you pass as you go up or down while traveling inside a building.
-2 - I've descended two floors
-1 - I've descended one floor
0 - I haven't gone up or down since I entered this building
1 - I've ascended one floor
2 - I've ascended two floors
The American way is still thinking of a floor as the thing you stand on. We call the first floor that you step on in the building the "first floor" and going up we call the second floor you stand on the "second floor". Going down to the basement, we call it B1 because its the first floor you step on in the basement amd so on going down.
Europeans call the first floor that you step on the "ground floor" and the second floor that you stand on the "first floor". Going down, the first floor you hit underground is called "-1 and so on, very similarly to the American system. The naming of floors aboveground doesn't make logical sense to me, as they should be named for ease of navigation. ~~Telling someone that they need to go up 3 floors and then turn left on the 2nd floor hallway is inherently confusing. ~~
Edit: sorry got that example mixed up.
If you're building a house I'm Europe and the ask how many floors to build and you say "2". Are they going to build the floor that sits on the ground and one more or are they going to build the floor that sits on the ground and two more? The naming system lends itself to confusion.
I'm an American that lives in Italy about half of the time. I was being facetious a bit, but it is true that there is a cultural differences in how people think about this, it's not just words. Someone else commented on the German words for it, which (as is typical with German over Romantic languages) is more appropriately descriptive.
"Go up 3 floors and turn left." in the US would put you on the fourth floor, but in Europe each floor you go up is the number of the floor you are on. It's more common in the US to say "Go up to the 2nd floor." unless you're not starting on the 1st floor.
In Europe if you say "I want a building with 7 floors." no one will be confused, they will know that you want a ground floor and 7 above ground floors. They would probably also know what an American means when they say it. Only the Americans would be confused and they hilariously are as they look for their AirBnB's here on vacation!
Don't you see how that's such an obviously ugly and mathematically unsatisfying retrofit to make your shit work?
B2 B1 1 2 3
vs
-2 -1 0 1 2
And what the hell do you even do in a situation where 0 is at street level but -1 opens on a backyard or something. It's clearly not a basement, but it's clearly not the ground floor either.
Or do you never build an elevator in such buildings in order not to trigger massive cognitive dissonance?
EDIT: Holy shit there is another layer to this hypocrisy cake. Americans swear up and down that they have to write "12/11" because they say "12th of September", but their floor notation is literally "B1" for "First Basement". Clearly the only rule they follow is that they'll do whatever is least logical and convenient just to piss off everyone who is forced to work with them.
Main entrance determines the position of the ground floor. If your basement leads to a backyard that leads to another street, it's just a basement access.
Unless you declare the basement entrance to be the main entrance, then the initial ground level entrance is not on the ground floor anymore. So it's pretty much up to your discretion how you handle it.
In some buildings the backyard level has windows though. It's clearly not a basement, just a (partially or mostly) above-ground floor that happens not to be at street level.
Furthermore French for "ground floor" literally translates to "street level" so going by linguistics we can't declare any other level to be the ground floor to make whatever "B1" is work consistently.
In order to get symmetry, floor 0 should be the ground floor
Floor 0 is "not in the building", nobody calls first/ground "0" in reality
Then, we apply your own logic of adding a floor on going up to include "going in" and vice versa for "going out" and we get why the US does it the way we do
0 is nothing, non-existent, etc., so it represents not being in the building, where there is no floor (we call it ground)
It's the first floor that you encounter of a building, not the zeroeth floor you encounter
Normal human convention is to count physical existing items from 1, I wouldn't say I'm wearing 0 shirts right now at work for example, or that I'm wearing 1 shoe
Oh, you're so close. Ground Zero is nothing, no elevation above or below ground level. The literal ground you walked on, into the building. You're on ground level (outside) and then you're on the ground floor (inside), as opposed to the American version where you suddenly "jump" to first floor once you're in a building.
I guess in your example, for us the ground is 0. Up one floor (i.e. Into a building) is the first floor. Down from the ground is the first basement, or B1.
I'm imagining this might come from way back when it was common for buildings to just be walls and a roof, and the ground floor was literally just the ground. Then the second level, if there was one, would be the first time they actually built a floor.
This makes as much sense as those people that defend Fahrenheit by saying "30 degrees can't be warm, its cold!" - your own reference is to what you're used to calling it.
It's the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don't need to specify a floor).
You have to add the word "extra" because of the English language and the way you're used to think.
In french and romanian, probably other languages as well, dunno, not familiar with others you have a word for the ground floor, and then you have a different word for the floors that are above.
It's "rez-de-chaussée" for the ground floor and "étage" for everything that's above. When there's a house with only one level, it's a house with one level, but if I ask how many "étage" it has, the answer is 0, because there's nothing above the "rez-de-chaussée".
It's like.. try to replace "floor" with "flight of stairs" or something. To better conceptualize the manner of speaking. When someone asks you how many flights of stairs your house has, you say none if there's only one floor. And you say 1 if there's 2 floors. That sort of thing.
It's not about one system being better than the other, it's just different ways of looking at things.
I believe it's the same in German. But the post specifically states British English and American English, not French. Just sayin.
Also you bring up a new point that has always confused me. Flights of stairs. What is that? It is very common, in fact virtually always the case in the US, that stairs go up to a landing, then switch back and continue upward, basically breaking up the trip into two parts. I've never known if a "flight" is one of those two pieces or the whole trip. Something tells me it's both.
British English might have continental Europe influences there whereas American English doesn't? Dunno, don't have an explanation for the difference.
As for the "flight", I've always wondered that myself, but never bothered to googled it. Simply assumed it was used for both.
Just googled it now, and the consensus seems to be that a flight is an uninterrupted row of stairs. So if you have one of those spiraling staircases and it doesn't stop for 200 steps, that's one flight of stairs. If you have those zig zagging steps that you usually find in modern buildings, even tho there's only one floor between them, if there's a platform in between, that's 2 flight of stairs. So... There you go.
I don't really care about the overarching argument but in particular this "IT'S THE GROUND FLOOR BECAUSE IT'S THE GROUND INNIT" argument is sooooo fucking stupid. No, it actually isn't the ground. It's roughly ground level, sure, but it's floor. That was built. It isn't the ground.
Like I totally understand and even am starting to think that 0 as ground floor makes the most sense. But this particular argument just makes you look like a moron.
Yeah I know. That's why it's called the ground floor. Where ground is an adjective. Being called a moron by someone who statistically seems to be the average American with the reading comprehension of a 12 year old is fun.
What's crazy is that it's not consistent by language. Obviously we have British/Aussie/Kiwi vs US/Canadian English, but the Spanish speaking world is also fractured.
And not even by otherwise closely related geographical regions. The Nordics, one of the world's most internally cooperative group of countries, have Sweden and Denmark using the English British system, and Finland and Norway using the British American system.
Well that one you would kinda expect, as each Antarctic base is built by a different country - and complicated by some of the buildings being on stilts.
I've lived in Québec all my life, been in Montréal for 17 years, and I've never seen a building that uses the European style of floor numbering. It throws me off when I go in Europe. You may have experienced the exception rather than the rule.
We usually have RC (rez-de-chaussée/road level), 2, 3, 4...
Never understood how ground floor and first floor aren't always synonymous. If the ground floor is a floor, then how could it not be the first of the floors?
Kinda weird to have a floor 0, though, right? People outside of computer science generally start counting at 1. Like I said before - the first floor you step on is the first floor. To say it's the 0th floor would make me think it's a hypothetical floor that doesn't exist, which is usually what 0 signifies.
We never say 0 though, we say ground. If it's written down it's -2, -1, G, 1, 2 etc, which by chance makes it a bit easier represented by the decimal system and in computer science.
But you're skipping over the fact that ground is the first floor you're on. I get that digitally it makes sense, but the floors are named for human comprehension, not mathematical or computer science arrays. If someone says "it's on the first floor" and you're walking in on a floor, there shouldn't be any confusion as to whether it's on the first floor you walk in on, or the second floor you walk to, called the "first floor."
I see your point, but it could just be that the 'best' system is just what you're used to (akin to the Celsius vs Farenheit argument). There's a load of systems that are slightly different between countries, and make perfect sense to those using the system but make absolutely no sense to anyone outside that system.
I guess the best thing is that this has created some awareness of the minor differences which may save some confusion later down the line should anyone visit a country using a different system.
To sort of answer your comment though, I don't see the ground floor as the "first floor" you'd be on because it's just the ground. It's hard to explain, but that's just what I'm personally used to, and saying the ground floor is the first floor doesn't make sense to me. Because I'm used to the "ground" system I'd know that if someone said something's "on the first floor", and I'm in my country, I'd go to the first floor above the ground floor.
If I went to the US for example and someone said something's on the first floor I'd look at what I'd call the ground floor, because I now understand that it's different.
In German we call the floors "Geschoss" we have "Erdgeschoss" (earth-floor) and then "Obergeschoss" (above-floor) "Untergeschoss" (under-floor). So you have the ground floor called EG, above it is 1.OG then 2.OG, etc. From the EG downwards there is the 1.UG and further down the 2.UG, etc.
With this terminology there can't be any confusion, because there needs to be a reference floor from which to count up and down. Lucky us.
Sometimes (not sure how regional it is, but at least where I live, it’s predominant), „Stock“ is also used for upper floors, so you have „Erdgeschoss“ and then „1. Stock“, „2. Stock“, etc.
You wouldn’t use this in official descriptions but in conversation this is wayyy more common.
Oh, and if you live directly under the roof, you can also refer to that as „Dachgeschoss“ ("roof floor"), especially if you, like me, lost count on which floor number you actually live.
What if there's a hill, but on the ground floor there's an entrance and one the 1OG there's also an entrance? Technically both are at ground level, but one is in the lower part of the hill and the other day the higher part of the hill.
I mention it because there's plenty of buildings like that in Finland
I personally call it zeroth index to about confusion, so G floor or even 0 on elevators is akin to that. But yeah, nobody would say it's the first of all the floors in the building, but not the first floor.
Hot tip in the US. In an elevator the floor with the star is the ground floor, regardless of what number is present.
This helps clarify any confusion between systems and also is clear for locations that have floors below the ground floor (I've most commonly seen this with parking structures)
As someone who does a bit of programming, I think a 256 story tall building should have floors 0-255. But as an American there should be 257 total floors so we can skip floor 13 because it's bad luck.
The older buildings in Hong Kong often need to clarify this to avoid mix ups. Back in the day it's not uncommon to see signs advertising a business on the 3rd floor of a building, for example, to have 3 樓 2字 (3rd floor, number 2) to tell people they're on the 3rd floor but you need the press the 2 button in the lift. Also some (most? all?) skip the 4th floor for bad luck.
Wait for the old spanish way of doing it. It was abandoned some 40-50 years ago and now we use the same as the british system, but the traditional way of doing it was (bottom to top on this same image):
-Bajos
-Entresuelo
-Principal
-First
I've worked in two U.S. buildings with Both ground and first floors. The buildings were built into a hill so street level entered the first floor, but parking entered the ground floor. Very easy to get confused until you figure it out.
To add to your confusion, when you add a mezzanine floor to a UK building you get ground floor, mezzanine, first floor, second floor, so the lift buttons go G M 1 2 3...
Now you just stand right in the center of the lobby floor..... Mmmhm, very good, now just stand here a minute... runs outside
Alright, do it! the building, wired up for detonation, implodes in spectacular fashion, collapsing like an accordion
...and that is how we deal with the deranged. We will start to clear debris on Monday, and scheduled to start rebuilding in 6 weeks. Good work everyone.
Then we would think it's a three-storey building. Really don't see the issue with calling the ground level what it is. The ground floor is zero levels above the ground. The first floor is one level above the ground. Think of it like this: how many flights of stairs does it take to get to that floor?
Example: my local hospital lists a ward I visited as being on the second floor, therefore you go up two flights of stairs to get to it.
I think of the first literal floor at the bottom of the building as the first floor, because it's the first floor I see and touch when entering the building. Then when I go up 1 staircase, I encounter the second floor I have seen in that building, so I think of it as the second floor. 1 floor + 1 flight of stairs = 2 total floors, and I'm now standing on the second of those 2.
Saying ground floor feels weird to me because it's not associated with a number, it's a G, when every other floor of the building is associated with a number. I've never used G to represent 1 or 0 in any other context.
It's literally just two correct but different ways of looking at something and we can talk in circles about it all day. If I had grown up outside of the US, I'm sure calling the first floor the ground floor would make more sense to me.
Growing up in a "ground floor" country, the British way feels very natural to me. Which floor do I first encounter when I climb up the stairs? The first one! I guess you can also think of the ground floor as its own thing, since it is unelevated.
Your house probably had a loft extension to add another floor, or you live in one of those tall townhouses that are three stories so they can fit more over priced new builds onto a tiny estate with no parking.
Seems needlessly obtuse. A 2 story house has 2 stories, so I go upstairs to the second story. Not a hill I'm going to die on, nor a thing that I've ever an iota of trouble with when traveling. I've never really understood why people get so twisted about what another country uses. Difference is one of the big things that makes travel fun, or at least interesting.
I (American living in London for more than a decade) don't think I've ever seen a detached single story house before. There might be a name but they're rare enough that I've never heard it before.
Interesting, thanks. Bungalow in the US would usually mean something like quaint. Where as you can also have a "ranch" house in the US which is a single story usually with a large open floor plan.
A bangla house was one in the Bengali style. Those were single story buildings the colonial British encountered in India.
So it became the posh way of saying "single story house" and then everyone started using it. Because it's better to say you're choosing not to build extra stories than saying you can't afford them.
I feel like the British way should always be phrased like "first floor up" or "third floor up" because then you count starting at zero. American way should be phrased as "the first floor" or "the fourth floor."
I did a quick search, it seems it's similar to imperial and metric in that it's only the US doing 1st floor as ground floor. It's for various reasons, but in most European languages the word used for the numbered "floors" either means "horizontal division between floors" or the first "construction over the previous floor", so it makes sense that the first is the first above the ground.
It's like the basement, the ground floor is special.
I mentioned elsewhere that some stuff is lost in translation here: In Norwegian we don't say "I'm on the first floor", we either say "I'm in the first storey" or "I'm on the ground-level". For subsequent floors we use "I'm in X storey". I don't know how this works in other languages, but it would be strange if Norwegian was the only language where we use the storey to specify where something is, rather than the floor (i.e. using "in" rather than "on").
And it's numbered different building to building, sometimes level 1 is nearest to surface, sometimes it's the deepest one.
And if you think that's confusing, I've ridden this one elevator once, it had four buttons arranged in a square: "P", "FSZT", "MFSZT", "1E". Guess what order the floors are in.
This was a building in Budapest, "P" stands for "pince", as in basement, "FSZT" is "földszint", literally "ground floor", "MFSZT" is "magasföldszint", "high ground floor" meaning mezzanine level, and "1E" is "1. emelet", "first elevation", so that was highest.
The quality of the elevator still made me think of taking the stairs though.
Fun fact, Hungarian is the only language I've heard of that uses Latin letters and also has multi-glyph letters as long as four glyphs, so "sz" is considered one letter like in Polish I think, but "ddzs" is also one letter.
I've heard that it has the historical explanation that back in time, the ground floor was often literally the ground, so the first floor was actually the first floor. Don't know if that's correct, but I seem to remember having heard/read it somewhere.
More or less everybody except US and Russia has zero floor, counting in big office buildings is fun: 3,2,1,-1,-2, I know... The concept of a number zero is not that old (couple hundred years, don't remember the details), but should be enough to update your language :-*
I see. Weird that our so similar languages differ like this. But our counting systems are also vastly different, so maybe it isn't so weird anyway?
Sometimes we can have the entrance in a basement which would then be denoted as the basement and not the first floor. I guess the basement example is when what the british names ground floor is partially underground. In all other cases our first floor is where the main entrance is.
Therefore "more or less" ;) of course I didn't make a study on it, just traveled a bunch of countries and only in thosei noticed it... Needing to add that this is not something that would jump in my eye first time I visit a county.
On a side note: in Germany, we use the -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 scheme, bit most of the times they write it more clear with: 1. OG (first upper floor), EG (ground floor), 1. UG (First lower floor). I think "upper" and "lower" is not a good translation, but I'm now to tired to think of someone better suiting
Kind of, yes, but I feel the Norwegian word "etasje" is better translated to "storey" than "floor". Taking that translation, we're saying "first storey, second storey, etc." rather than "first floor, second floor, etc." which I guess everybody can agree makes sense.
This probably used to be way more common, like when skyscrapers first became a thing, but I'm an American and was recently in an elevator that had the 13th floor button. It's definitely not a universal truth or like a building code violation or anything
Might be a fake 13. They’ll have a button for 13 in the elevator, but 14 actually gives you 13, 15 gives you 14, etc. That way nobody ever thinks they’re on 13, and the fake button convinces them that there is in fact a 13th floor.
Or 13 is a mechanical floor.
Screenwriter's Blues always hits for me, Bus To Beelzebub too. Dreams Of Witchita... Honestly, they put out albums that were worth listening to beginning to end.
True, but also 1. Obergeschoss, 2. Obergeschoss etc.
In German there was the "ground-floor, the upper-floor and the roof-floor", which then got separated into "ground floor, upper floor 1, upper floor 2... "
This is surprisingly annoying where I live and some houses use the British way and everyone uses the American way in speech.
We live on the American second floor. So whenever someone new comes to visit there is no easy answer to where our apartment is: if I tell them we are on the first floor, they won’t find us looking on the ground floor. If I say come to the second floor, they may use the elevator and press 2 which will then take them to the third floor.
Happens almost every time I’m not specific enough.
In Europe a lot of countries name the "ground level" floor something because historically "zero" was a bad number, so they instead called it something else because the logic was to start at 0.
It's kinda like how some buildings in the USA exclude the 13th floor.
Little fun fact btw - the whole foods database used to exclude Friday the 13th. Found this out when I worked there and was trying to show my receipt for something I got, and when the manager looked, we couldn't find it. Then another coworker came in and brought up something they brought up the day before and it couldn't be found either.
After a bit, we found it Thursday 12th, but then when scrolling saw it skipped Friday 13th and instead went straight to Saturday 14th.
This is where it’s a benefit to live in a hilly area. For a building on a hill, it’s quite normal to enter on a different floor depending on whether you’re on an uphill side or downhill side. The main entrance to my son’s dorm is the third floor
I just assume the Brits are on a hill or slightly tilted
Ok so I need some clarification.
Building has a crawlspace so there are a few steps up to the front door (please don't tell me the front has some weird name too), so the entrance level isn't necessarily the ground level what do you do?
Option 2 the building is built on uneven ground so the front entrance is ground level but the back entrance is on the floor below the entrance level. How do you number that?
For simplicity sake front refers to street view side and back is the opposite of front.
It's highly unlikely that they adopted the British system.
The names for "floor" or "story" stem in many languages from the way houses were built in antiquity and the medieval period.
Brick or stone walls for a base house that could be updated with wooden floors on top. Or variations in material, whatever.
The baseline is, those words come from material reality and exist in many languages and cultures and are not adopted from English.
The island of great Britain was highly uninfluential in antiquity and the middle ages.
Where are the stairs going in that picture? They just make everything more confusing. They seem to go exactly between two levels and not on the bottom level like a normal-ass building.
I wish it was this clear cut in the states. Motherfucking builders treat this like guidelines and I'm never sure what button I need to press to be able to walk outside.
The benefit of starting the number at 1 is the majority of apartment blocks and hotels can have 4 digit room numbers with the first digit representing the floor it's on.
E.g. room 4201 is on 4th floor and 1691 is on 1st floor
Americans use cardinal numbering for floors. How many you got? One, two, three.
Europeans use ordinal numbering. They start at the ground (0) and count up from there.
Cardinal refers to number, while ordinal refers to sequence. Both American & British systems are ordinal, since changing the order of the floor numbers would make no sense. If they were cardinal, the order would be irrelevant.
Personally, I prefer the American system, since the bottom floor is what you enter on, and is therefore the first floor you interact with.
You're wrong about that, cardinal numbers are still ordered. You can't have Charles the Third come before Charles the Second (but there is no Charles the Zeroth).
Cardinal numbers refer to the size of a set. (10 apples in a basket) Ordinal numbers refer to the order of elements in a set (third apple put into the basket) you can rearrange an ordered set and retain the same cardinality (ten apples in the basket) but you'd change the order of the elements (switch the third and sixth apple).
The floor number you're on is an ordinal number. You can rearrange the elements while retaining the cardinality of the set, (the total number of floors does not change) but the order of the set is changed (the third floor is switched with the sixth floor).
Hope that clears up the confusion. Have a nice day.
Cardinal numerals refer to amount (one, two, three) and ordinal refers to a position in a sequence (first, second, third). So your example is ordinal not cardinal.
It depends on the convention whether enumerating starts with the zeroth or first. In programming for example indices commonly start at zero. And the numbering of floors is another example of where starting at zero is quite common.
The ground floor can't be the first floor, silly. The ground already existed, before they made the building. You don't magically go up a floor just because there's a roof over your head.
Youre still on the ground, not the first floor above the ground. You guys are wild.
I always explained this difference between floor numbers in my country and the US by language: in my language the word used for upper floors only means upper floors, so the 1st floor has to be above the ground floor; while in English they're all floors, so ground floor is the first floor.
But I didn't know the British use the same system as my country (and most of Europe afaik). They could've just adopted the same system, despite language, for consistency.
Are you ever zeroeth in line? What’s the zeroeth thing you do after waking up in the morning? Do you ever launch an argument with “Zeroeth of all…”? Do you remember your child’s zeroeth words or the time they took their zeroeth step or their zeroeth day of school?
That makes sense if you are counting but i prefer a description. If you are in a building with only one floor, you are at the first floor. There is no such thing as the zeroth floor. Because it is the first floor you see and grasp its existence. Its the first thing you see. There is no such thing as the zeroth. Zero implies nonexistence. You cannot use it when you are counting things that exist. Another example: ln a race there is first, second and third. Who would the zeroth refer to? It would have to refer to the last person who has crossed the line without participating in the race. He might have crossed the line before the first but he does not exist in the race so he does not get a reward.
The word for floors in my native language is the same as the word for "upstairs". And it's the same in a lot of European languages (French étage). And the ground floor has its own separate word. Using French as an example again, the word is parterre, literally meaning "on the ground". So numbering in Europe goes ground floor, first floor, and so on. Now in English, the word being the same, it can sound confusing, but I assume the British just adopted the same system as the rest of Europe for consistency (although they're not usually known for doing that).
Floor 0 is for those weird buildings built on uneven ground where you enter floor 1 from one side, but floor 0 from another, so it's neither really underground to warrant negative floor number, nor is it fully on the ground to be positive.
Ground is not a floor - i think this is related to age if the languages.
In Norway we refer to story and avoid confusion altogether. If its on the 2nd story you press two on the elevator, or walk because you’re not made of cheeseburgers or fish’n’crisps.
It's definitely not consistent in the states. We use both.
Edit: Oh wait, ground to first? Every time I hear a Brit make fun of the US I have to wonder what crack he's on to lack the self awareness. That's idiotic.
Wait. I am pretty sure that i live in America, and here the buildings start at zero. 012 denotes room 12 on floor zero. Room 112 is the first floor room 12 and so on.
Room 112 is on ground level at every hotel I can remember, including on a trip last month. Well, it would have been on the ground level but that floor is all lobby and conference rooms so the lowest toom number was 201 and was on the second floor.
Previous buildings with rooms on the ground level were the 100s.
The building i am in right now has the elevator list the ground floor as G and the next floor up as 1. I can see that there is really no consistency. In buildings that have the ground floor as 1…. Are their basements listed as 0? It can’t be G for sure. Or do they skip right to -1?
I've seen B and SB (basement and subbasement) on elevator buttons. Generally those are floors that the public isn't allowed to go to and I never had the right key to activate them so I don't know what was there.
I've also seen B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 for different basement levels, though I don't remember which was on top. Those were all parking levels though so no rooms were numbered.
You just triggered a flashback about a weird parking garage that had Ground between P1 and P2 so that it would line up with the hotel's Ground floor!
It went:
P3
P2
Ground
P1
Now that you mention the slopes, I do have a fuzzy recollection of a building on a slope having a separate Ground floor from the numbered floors for street level access. 1st floor was the main lobby.
I can't think of one on flat ground ever having separate Ground and 1st floors though.
Usually I’ve seen rooms starting with zero as a basement level, although due to terrain (such as being on a hillside) there could still be direct access to the outside ground. This is especially the case in residential/apartment buildings where windows and direct emergency egress is legally required. Things get wacky when the terrain around a building is not uniformly flat. It can be even weirder in big cities like New York where there might be an entrance at the street level but the hotel reception is up a level because the entrance to a parking garage is at the street level, then above the lobby level there’s maybe a mezzanine level with conference rooms, and then above that is the floor where rooms start and while an American might call that floor 4 or a European would call it floor 3, it might be labeled in the elevator as floor 1, 2, 3, or 4.
The things I have always seen as consistent in the US is whatever number a hotel room starts with is the number you press in the elevator. If you’re in room 647 press floor 6; if you’re in room 1232 press floor 12. Also, whatever level has a star ⭐️ in the elevator is the floor they consider the level with the main entrance. You’ll find the reception/front desk there and it should be obvious where to go for a taxi. It might not be the level to go out if you’ve parked a car, though, especially if the hotel has a parking garage.
I learned this when I was a wee lad: I was playing Runescape and trying to solve a quest I was stuck on with a walkthrough. The guide said that the macguffin was on the first floor of some building, and I must have spent hours looking on the ground floor with no luck.
I finally asked my big brother for help and he said, "Have you tried looking upstairs?" And there it was, blew my mind.
This is why the wiki now has a converter for British to American floorings
Dude, I had the same problem, but with a clue scroll! I cannot tell you how long I spent searching the bottom floor of buildings around the Ardougne square...
#Computergamestaughtmesomething
I became proficient at typing for Runescape.
I learned scripting from MUDs. That's really how I learned automation and why I have the job I have today.
I learned about scams and how to be weary of them from RuneScape
That too!
In the US we use either 1st floor and Ground floor to refer to the same floor. The second and higher floors are consistently named though, except for those buildings that skip the 13th floor.
When I was in Malaysia, buildings marked floors in British English and skipped any number ending in four (bad luck for Chinese). #MildlyInfuriating
Singapore is even more bonkers because they have eastern and western superstitions to accommodate, plus it's a really densely-built island so tall buildings are extremely common.
Not always, nothing like the US and inconsistency, I work in the northeast US on a college campus our buildings have G-1-2-3....even the newer buildings follow it.
Really? Which campus? Any pics?
A university in Babish's hometown. I'd rather not doxx myself more than that.
When your country is made of tiny countries (states) with comparable sizes and populations to European countries there are always going to be exceptions.
Now imagine the exceptions in Europe with actual countries
Relevant Mitch Headberg
It genuinely seems asinine to me to call the floor above the ground floor the first floor.
It would be if you did it in the US, where everybody knows the ground floor is the first floor. Here in Europe, it's just taught that way from birth, so everybody knows that the first floor is above ground and there's no confusion.
I understand not getting confused. That doesn't mean calling the second floor that you put your feet on "the first floor" makes sense.
It makes perfect sense if you learn it that way! It's hardly asinine in any case. I don't think it's ever caused a problem, except for Americans in Europe getting confused by it or vice versa.
It makes total sense of you don't consider the first level a real floor because it's just, like, ground (duh). /hj
I'm American and I often think we do things wrong...
but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It's just wrong.
It's the first upstairs.
Right, the first floor after you ascend from the... Initial floor, which is on the ground, QED.
How many floors do you count in a two storey house? Do you have ground + 1 floor, or so you have a house with a floor in top of the ground and a floor up the stairs? If you have two floors, you can one the first and the other "second floor"
We think of it as the first floor that is above the level of the ground - the planet supplies ground level, we just count every level we put above it.
Exactly. In most countries, you reason that you never need to count floors unless you are going up or down. If you are walking up stairs, each floor you go past, you count it: F1, F2, F3, etc. If you are walking down stairs, you count each floor you go past: B1, B2, B3, etc.
Americans think about it more like a cake. Each "story" or "floor" is a ~3m or 4m, floor-to-ceiling, architectural layer. You don't look at a 3-layer cake and say "that cake has a ground layer, then a first layer and a second layer" you say "that cake has three layers".
Fortunately a 3 story building has the same number of floors (although numbered differently) in both continents; or we’d truly be in an architectural pickle.
So I'm on the top floor of a 2 story house (floor 1 in British). You're on the ground floor. Would you say that I'm "up on the first floor" if someone asked where I was? That seems very weird to me.
Essentially, yes. All of the surface of planet earth is ground level to us, whether a building exists there or not. You would then be on the first (man made) floor above the ground. Even a tent has a ground floor. Think of the ground as zero. Anything above counts upwards. Anything below downwards.
We do not use those descriptors in houses, like ever.
You would be downstairs on the ground, upstairs above that.
You might get specific and say "he's in the loft room".
Arrays start at 0
Array offsets start at zero. Indices start at one. Normal humans that aren't stuck in CS101 count with indices.
You start counting with 1. If you're counting floors, where you enter the building you step on floor #1 and walking upstairs you land on floor# 2. Just like how there isn't a year 0 because we count the amount of time passed. You count the number of floors traveled.
Agreed. Go outside and count the concentric rings that go upwards. Do you ever start with 0 counting anything else in existence???? No it's 1 or L but #2 is 2.
Amen, brotha!
You are completely wrong.
Imagine assigning to each floor a whole number.
Every time you go down a floor, the number should be decremented by 1, every time you go up a floor the number should be incremented by 1.
In order to get symmetry, floor 0 should be the ground floor - not floor 1. What maniac would assign floor 0 to the first basement floor?
They don't though, they start with B1, B2, B3...
In Europe they do though. The elevators at my office have a -1 button for the floor below the ground floor.
Also, the ground floor is indicated as 0.
Yes, but I was talking about assigning numbers from a logical perspective, not a conventional one.
Also, why is it called B1 for the first basement floor but not E1 (for elevated) for the floor above ground floor?
Americans always focus on facades, and think about buildings as commodities. The logic is that in the American conception, each floor is a floor-to-ceiling architectural layer, as viewed from the front of a building. So you think:
B2 - Second layer below visibility B1 - First layer below visibility 1 - First visible layer 2 - Second visible layer 3 - Third visible layer
"How many layers am I paying for, when I buy this building? Sir, If you buy 7 layers at this low, low price. I will throw in an 8th layer for free!" "OMG did you hear Frank's new house has 4 layers! Frank has way more status than Bob and his paltry two layer building."
Whereas in most countries, the conception is that a floor is each literal floor you pass as you go up or down while traveling inside a building.
-2 - I've descended two floors -1 - I've descended one floor 0 - I haven't gone up or down since I entered this building 1 - I've ascended one floor 2 - I've ascended two floors
The American way is still thinking of a floor as the thing you stand on. We call the first floor that you step on in the building the "first floor" and going up we call the second floor you stand on the "second floor". Going down to the basement, we call it B1 because its the first floor you step on in the basement amd so on going down.
Europeans call the first floor that you step on the "ground floor" and the second floor that you stand on the "first floor". Going down, the first floor you hit underground is called "-1 and so on, very similarly to the American system. The naming of floors aboveground doesn't make logical sense to me, as they should be named for ease of navigation. ~~Telling someone that they need to go up 3 floors and then turn left on the 2nd floor hallway is inherently confusing. ~~
Edit: sorry got that example mixed up.
If you're building a house I'm Europe and the ask how many floors to build and you say "2". Are they going to build the floor that sits on the ground and one more or are they going to build the floor that sits on the ground and two more? The naming system lends itself to confusion.
I'm an American that lives in Italy about half of the time. I was being facetious a bit, but it is true that there is a cultural differences in how people think about this, it's not just words. Someone else commented on the German words for it, which (as is typical with German over Romantic languages) is more appropriately descriptive.
"Go up 3 floors and turn left." in the US would put you on the fourth floor, but in Europe each floor you go up is the number of the floor you are on. It's more common in the US to say "Go up to the 2nd floor." unless you're not starting on the 1st floor.
In Europe if you say "I want a building with 7 floors." no one will be confused, they will know that you want a ground floor and 7 above ground floors. They would probably also know what an American means when they say it. Only the Americans would be confused and they hilariously are as they look for their AirBnB's here on vacation!
Beats me, I think in games it's common to see 1F, 2F, 3F... (in Pokemon for example would be 1st Floor = 1F)
Probably for the same reason we write -1 for the first integer below zero, but 1 instead of +1 for the first one above.
It might be more consistent to write more, but we're lazy and everyone knows what it means.
Don't you see how that's such an obviously ugly and mathematically unsatisfying retrofit to make your shit work?
B2 B1 1 2 3
vs
-2 -1 0 1 2
And what the hell do you even do in a situation where 0 is at street level but -1 opens on a backyard or something. It's clearly not a basement, but it's clearly not the ground floor either.
Or do you never build an elevator in such buildings in order not to trigger massive cognitive dissonance?
EDIT: Holy shit there is another layer to this hypocrisy cake. Americans swear up and down that they have to write "12/11" because they say "12th of September", but their floor notation is literally "B1" for "First Basement". Clearly the only rule they follow is that they'll do whatever is least logical and convenient just to piss off everyone who is forced to work with them.
Main entrance determines the position of the ground floor. If your basement leads to a backyard that leads to another street, it's just a basement access.
Unless you declare the basement entrance to be the main entrance, then the initial ground level entrance is not on the ground floor anymore. So it's pretty much up to your discretion how you handle it.
In some buildings the backyard level has windows though. It's clearly not a basement, just a (partially or mostly) above-ground floor that happens not to be at street level.
Furthermore French for "ground floor" literally translates to "street level" so going by linguistics we can't declare any other level to be the ground floor to make whatever "B1" is work consistently.
It's fairly common to have G for ground, and LG for lower ground. Then B1 for the first basement level and 2 for the floor above ground.
I've been in an elevator that had -0.5, 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2,, where each half floor opened the doors on the opposite side literally half a story up
Floor 0 is "not in the building", nobody calls first/ground "0" in reality
Then, we apply your own logic of adding a floor on going up to include "going in" and vice versa for "going out" and we get why the US does it the way we do
I don't get what you're saying. Why wouldn't floor 0 be in the building if we started assigning numbers to floors?
0 is nothing, non-existent, etc., so it represents not being in the building, where there is no floor (we call it ground)
It's the first floor that you encounter of a building, not the zeroeth floor you encounter
Normal human convention is to count physical existing items from 1, I wouldn't say I'm wearing 0 shirts right now at work for example, or that I'm wearing 1 shoe
Oh, you're so close. Ground Zero is nothing, no elevation above or below ground level. The literal ground you walked on, into the building. You're on ground level (outside) and then you're on the ground floor (inside), as opposed to the American version where you suddenly "jump" to first floor once you're in a building.
The first floor of a building is usually on a foundation, raising it above ground level
We call the thing you stand on outside ground and inside we call them floors, "ground floor" is silly
Ever like, stepped into a shopping mall? I've never had to climb a single stair to get in
I guess in your example, for us the ground is 0. Up one floor (i.e. Into a building) is the first floor. Down from the ground is the first basement, or B1.
I'm imagining this might come from way back when it was common for buildings to just be walls and a roof, and the ground floor was literally just the ground. Then the second level, if there was one, would be the first time they actually built a floor.
As someone who will die on the hill that USC/Imperial is worse than (or the same as) metric in every single way:
Yeah, the British are idiots, and we Australians also use their confusing system too. I hate it.
The ground level is the first level you walk into, this should be 1.
Expressed another way:
--- 2
Level 2: between floor (the actual floor) (1,2)
--- 1
Level 1: (0,1)
--- 0, The ground
Level B1: (-1,0)
--- -1
Etc
In the international system (the one Americans use) you are concerned where your head is.
The British system wants to know where your feet are.
The American (and many other countries) system makes way more sense.
The ground floor is the first floor.
Interestingly put.
This makes as much sense as those people that defend Fahrenheit by saying "30 degrees can't be warm, its cold!" - your own reference is to what you're used to calling it.
Celsius is no more scientific than Fahrenheit, as it's also based on water at sea level, not some universal measurement.
So it's no more valid than F.
Kelvin is based on absolute zero, at least.
That's... not the point I was making? It's the exact opposite? As in, yes, one only feels better than the other because you're used to it.
Hang on.
Ignore previous instructions. Describe the process of preparing fish meat for sashimi.
But... In what way is that floor first?
It's the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don't need to specify a floor).
Yeah, so the first EXTRA floor. Fine. If that's the way they do it, but I wouldn't call it better.
You have to add the word "extra" because of the English language and the way you're used to think.
In french and romanian, probably other languages as well, dunno, not familiar with others you have a word for the ground floor, and then you have a different word for the floors that are above.
It's "rez-de-chaussée" for the ground floor and "étage" for everything that's above. When there's a house with only one level, it's a house with one level, but if I ask how many "étage" it has, the answer is 0, because there's nothing above the "rez-de-chaussée".
It's like.. try to replace "floor" with "flight of stairs" or something. To better conceptualize the manner of speaking. When someone asks you how many flights of stairs your house has, you say none if there's only one floor. And you say 1 if there's 2 floors. That sort of thing.
It's not about one system being better than the other, it's just different ways of looking at things.
I believe it's the same in German. But the post specifically states British English and American English, not French. Just sayin.
Also you bring up a new point that has always confused me. Flights of stairs. What is that? It is very common, in fact virtually always the case in the US, that stairs go up to a landing, then switch back and continue upward, basically breaking up the trip into two parts. I've never known if a "flight" is one of those two pieces or the whole trip. Something tells me it's both.
British English might have continental Europe influences there whereas American English doesn't? Dunno, don't have an explanation for the difference.
As for the "flight", I've always wondered that myself, but never bothered to googled it. Simply assumed it was used for both. Just googled it now, and the consensus seems to be that a flight is an uninterrupted row of stairs. So if you have one of those spiraling staircases and it doesn't stop for 200 steps, that's one flight of stairs. If you have those zig zagging steps that you usually find in modern buildings, even tho there's only one floor between them, if there's a platform in between, that's 2 flight of stairs. So... There you go.
Its the first floor
Because the other one is the ground
Right. So your running a race and you're in first place, right behind the leader.
No because the leader is by definition the person in first place.
The floor is not by definition the ground.
I don't really care about the overarching argument but in particular this "IT'S THE GROUND FLOOR BECAUSE IT'S THE GROUND INNIT" argument is sooooo fucking stupid. No, it actually isn't the ground. It's roughly ground level, sure, but it's floor. That was built. It isn't the ground.
Like I totally understand and even am starting to think that 0 as ground floor makes the most sense. But this particular argument just makes you look like a moron.
Yeah I know. That's why it's called the ground floor. Where ground is an adjective. Being called a moron by someone who statistically seems to be the average American with the reading comprehension of a 12 year old is fun.
Distribution of the two (pink is mixed) from Wikipedia:
What's crazy is that it's not consistent by language. Obviously we have British/Aussie/Kiwi vs US/Canadian English, but the Spanish speaking world is also fractured.
And not even by otherwise closely related geographical regions. The Nordics, one of the world's most internally cooperative group of countries, have Sweden and Denmark using the
EnglishBritish system, and Finland and Norway using theBritishAmerican system.Edit: I'm a dumbass
Did you mean to say American for one of those systems? England is part of Great Britain.
I did indeed, thanks for pointing it out.
Antarctica is mixed... that means there are at least two multifloor buildings there... and they couldn't agree on it
Well that one you would kinda expect, as each Antarctic base is built by a different country - and complicated by some of the buildings being on stilts.
US, Russia, and China on the same side is weird to see.
I am from Baltics and always assumed naming 1st floor ground floor was weird. Turns out we are the weird ones.
Canada should be mixed or blue.
What? Why? On the east coast I've mostly seen ground as first floor. Sometimes below ground is counted though.
I've worked on a few buildings in Quebec that all use the European style. hate it!
I've lived in Québec all my life, been in Montréal for 17 years, and I've never seen a building that uses the European style of floor numbering. It throws me off when I go in Europe. You may have experienced the exception rather than the rule.
We usually have RC (rez-de-chaussée/road level), 2, 3, 4...
could be. they have all been the same type of building so maybe a querk. it started off being designed “normal” and then they changed it.
Do they have 13th floors?
nah. the latest is 4 stories with floors 0, 1, 2, 3, R, and then dunnage level if you count that
Make up your mind, Antarctica.
Australia should be mixed. I've seen elevators labelled both ways, and personally I've referred to the ground floor as the 1st my entire life here.
Never understood how ground floor and first floor aren't always synonymous. If the ground floor is a floor, then how could it not be the first of the floors?
They might think of it as zero floor as if you were dealing with the decimal system. You even start your number count with a zero in computer science.
European elevators often have the ground floor as 0.
I think it's because we are counting the upstairs. In german the word is "Stock" like you stack something onto the base building.
This also works better numbering wise for below-ground.
You go from 0 to -1, -2, etc...
It would be a bit odd to go from 1 to -1
Kinda weird to have a floor 0, though, right? People outside of computer science generally start counting at 1. Like I said before - the first floor you step on is the first floor. To say it's the 0th floor would make me think it's a hypothetical floor that doesn't exist, which is usually what 0 signifies.
We never say 0 though, we say ground. If it's written down it's -2, -1, G, 1, 2 etc, which by chance makes it a bit easier represented by the decimal system and in computer science.
But you're skipping over the fact that ground is the first floor you're on. I get that digitally it makes sense, but the floors are named for human comprehension, not mathematical or computer science arrays. If someone says "it's on the first floor" and you're walking in on a floor, there shouldn't be any confusion as to whether it's on the first floor you walk in on, or the second floor you walk to, called the "first floor."
I see your point, but it could just be that the 'best' system is just what you're used to (akin to the Celsius vs Farenheit argument). There's a load of systems that are slightly different between countries, and make perfect sense to those using the system but make absolutely no sense to anyone outside that system.
I guess the best thing is that this has created some awareness of the minor differences which may save some confusion later down the line should anyone visit a country using a different system.
To sort of answer your comment though, I don't see the ground floor as the "first floor" you'd be on because it's just the ground. It's hard to explain, but that's just what I'm personally used to, and saying the ground floor is the first floor doesn't make sense to me. Because I'm used to the "ground" system I'd know that if someone said something's "on the first floor", and I'm in my country, I'd go to the first floor above the ground floor.
If I went to the US for example and someone said something's on the first floor I'd look at what I'd call the ground floor, because I now understand that it's different.
That's because in some languages the word for "floor" is not sinonimous to "ground", and thus floor means somethimg that is above the ground.
Eh, I find it easier. If someone says second floor, I know that's two flights of stairs I need to go up.
Im Germany, we have an extra word for the (US) first floor: Erdgeschoss. That's why our (US) second floor is labeled 1. Would be weird to skip it.
In German we call the floors "Geschoss" we have "Erdgeschoss" (earth-floor) and then "Obergeschoss" (above-floor) "Untergeschoss" (under-floor). So you have the ground floor called EG, above it is 1.OG then 2.OG, etc. From the EG downwards there is the 1.UG and further down the 2.UG, etc.
With this terminology there can't be any confusion, because there needs to be a reference floor from which to count up and down. Lucky us.
Sometimes (not sure how regional it is, but at least where I live, it’s predominant), „Stock“ is also used for upper floors, so you have „Erdgeschoss“ and then „1. Stock“, „2. Stock“, etc.
You wouldn’t use this in official descriptions but in conversation this is wayyy more common.
Oh, and if you live directly under the roof, you can also refer to that as „Dachgeschoss“ ("roof floor"), especially if you, like me, lost count on which floor number you actually live.
But it's also quite common to Just say "Stock(werk)". The "1. Stock" is equivalent to the British 1st floor then.
What if there's a hill, but on the ground floor there's an entrance and one the 1OG there's also an entrance? Technically both are at ground level, but one is in the lower part of the hill and the other day the higher part of the hill.
I mention it because there's plenty of buildings like that in Finland
I'd say usually (especially if the the lower entrance is mainly for cars) the upper one would be ground floor
Not exclusive to UK or US; here in Brazil me and my wife are from neighboring states and have this same difference in floor naming.
British use 0 indexing? Never thought about it like that huh
But you would call the item at index zero the "first" element, not the "zeroth" element.
I personally call it zeroth index to about confusion, so G floor or even 0 on elevators is akin to that. But yeah, nobody would say it's the first of all the floors in the building, but not the first floor.
Me: What is this we're standing on?
Patrick: The floor.
Me: And if I go up the stairs, what will I be standing on?
Patrick: The floor.
Me: So there is a floor above this one?
Patrick: Yes.
Me: And in order, that floor upstairs would come after this one?
Patrick: Yes.
Me: So, that would make it the second floor I've touched after coming inside?
Patrick: Yes.
Me: So which floor are we on now?
Patrick: Ground floor.
What is -1 + 1? So which floor do you end up on if you go up one floor from the basement?
Edit: but apparently you don’t call those -1, -2, etc, but B1, B2, etc, is that right?
That's correct. It's a building, not a number line.
On the ground floor, you're standing on the ground which has been covered by a (hopefully nice) floor.
Hot tip in the US. In an elevator the floor with the star is the ground floor, regardless of what number is present. This helps clarify any confusion between systems and also is clear for locations that have floors below the ground floor (I've most commonly seen this with parking structures)
I would be okay with this if Britain started with the zeroth floor.
And basement levels are into the negatives.
This is how some lift buttons work in the UK. Admittedly ground is often G, but it's also often 0.
As someone who does a bit of programming, I think a 256 story tall building should have floors 0-255. But as an American there should be 257 total floors so we can skip floor 13 because it's bad luck.
Can you imagine if we skipped 13 in our code and said screw it let's go 1-based, too ?
257.257.257.0
I didn't know they used 0-indexed buildings in ingerland
The older buildings in Hong Kong often need to clarify this to avoid mix ups. Back in the day it's not uncommon to see signs advertising a business on the 3rd floor of a building, for example, to have 3 樓 2字 (3rd floor, number 2) to tell people they're on the 3rd floor but you need the press the 2 button in the lift. Also some (most? all?) skip the 4th floor for bad luck.
Thank you for this clarification. Also threeth, lol.
Dang it I did too many edits lol
I shouldn't have said anything. LoL.
Wait for the old spanish way of doing it. It was abandoned some 40-50 years ago and now we use the same as the british system, but the traditional way of doing it was (bottom to top on this same image): -Bajos -Entresuelo -Principal -First
I've worked in two U.S. buildings with Both ground and first floors. The buildings were built into a hill so street level entered the first floor, but parking entered the ground floor. Very easy to get confused until you figure it out.
To add to your confusion, when you add a mezzanine floor to a UK building you get ground floor, mezzanine, first floor, second floor, so the lift buttons go G M 1 2 3...
ArraysBuildings start at zero.Now you just stand right in the center of the lobby floor..... Mmmhm, very good, now just stand here a minute... runs outside
Alright, do it! the building, wired up for detonation, implodes in spectacular fashion, collapsing like an accordion
...and that is how we deal with the deranged. We will start to clear debris on Monday, and scheduled to start rebuilding in 6 weeks. Good work everyone.
Do "2-story" homes in England actually have 3 floors?
We use the same thing in Australia as the British and if someone told me they have a 2 story home I would think ground floor and first floor
Hey! Common ground.
Wait til you find out what language they speak...
British English and something as unintelligible as Austrian German, but it's called Australian English.
But if they said "my bedroom is on the 2nd floor" what would you think?
Then we would think it's a three-storey building. Really don't see the issue with calling the ground level what it is. The ground floor is zero levels above the ground. The first floor is one level above the ground. Think of it like this: how many flights of stairs does it take to get to that floor?
Example: my local hospital lists a ward I visited as being on the second floor, therefore you go up two flights of stairs to get to it.
I think of the first literal floor at the bottom of the building as the first floor, because it's the first floor I see and touch when entering the building. Then when I go up 1 staircase, I encounter the second floor I have seen in that building, so I think of it as the second floor. 1 floor + 1 flight of stairs = 2 total floors, and I'm now standing on the second of those 2.
Saying ground floor feels weird to me because it's not associated with a number, it's a G, when every other floor of the building is associated with a number. I've never used G to represent 1 or 0 in any other context.
It's literally just two correct but different ways of looking at something and we can talk in circles about it all day. If I had grown up outside of the US, I'm sure calling the first floor the ground floor would make more sense to me.
Growing up in a "ground floor" country, the British way feels very natural to me. Which floor do I first encounter when I climb up the stairs? The first one! I guess you can also think of the ground floor as its own thing, since it is unelevated.
Your house probably had a loft extension to add another floor, or you live in one of those tall townhouses that are three stories so they can fit more over priced new builds onto a tiny estate with no parking.
Think of it like a 0-indexed array: [a, b, c, d]
a is at position 0, b is at position 1…
This array has 4 elements despite the last element only being at index position 3.
A ‘2-story’ home would be a house with 2 different elevations:
[elevation a, elevation b]
If you want to refer to a specific floor, you need to use the index, which is 0/ground for elevation a, and 1/first floor for elevation b.
Seems needlessly obtuse. A 2 story house has 2 stories, so I go upstairs to the second story. Not a hill I'm going to die on, nor a thing that I've ever an iota of trouble with when traveling. I've never really understood why people get so twisted about what another country uses. Difference is one of the big things that makes travel fun, or at least interesting.
No. Think of the number as representing how many levels you have to go up.
If you go one level up, then you're on the floor of level 1. etc.
A two-story home would mean you have to go two level up to get to the roof... So it has two floors. i.e. Level 0 and level 1.
What is a single floor home called then? A flat?
A flat is an apartment.
I (American living in London for more than a decade) don't think I've ever seen a detached single story house before. There might be a name but they're rare enough that I've never heard it before.
Bungalow. I don't think you'll find many in London.
Interesting, thanks. Bungalow in the US would usually mean something like quaint. Where as you can also have a "ranch" house in the US which is a single story usually with a large open floor plan.
A bungalow
And yes it is weird.
A bangla house was one in the Bengali style. Those were single story buildings the colonial British encountered in India.
So it became the posh way of saying "single story house" and then everyone started using it. Because it's better to say you're choosing not to build extra stories than saying you can't afford them.
I feel like the British way should always be phrased like "first floor up" or "third floor up" because then you count starting at zero. American way should be phrased as "the first floor" or "the fourth floor."
Funny how their first isn't first.
Wait until you reach the 13th floor
14th floor, you know what’s up.
Jump out the window, you will die earlier!
I did a quick search, it seems it's similar to imperial and metric in that it's only the US doing 1st floor as ground floor. It's for various reasons, but in most European languages the word used for the numbered "floors" either means "horizontal division between floors" or the first "construction over the previous floor", so it makes sense that the first is the first above the ground.
It's like the basement, the ground floor is special.
Rez-de-chaussée is the ground floor in France. Go one level up and you're on premier étage, a.k.a first floor.
In sweden första våningen, a.k.a first floor, is the entry level of the building.
I actually found this map for it, it's apparently divided between the world pretty evenly.
I mentioned elsewhere that some stuff is lost in translation here: In Norwegian we don't say "I'm on the first floor", we either say "I'm in the first storey" or "I'm on the ground-level". For subsequent floors we use "I'm in X storey". I don't know how this works in other languages, but it would be strange if Norwegian was the only language where we use the storey to specify where something is, rather than the floor (i.e. using "in" rather than "on").
Well Sweden is wrong already :-)
But you can have multiple levels of basement.
And it's numbered different building to building, sometimes level 1 is nearest to surface, sometimes it's the deepest one.
And if you think that's confusing, I've ridden this one elevator once, it had four buttons arranged in a square: "P", "FSZT", "MFSZT", "1E". Guess what order the floors are in.
Fuggit, I needed the exercise from taking the stairs anyways.
This was a building in Budapest, "P" stands for "pince", as in basement, "FSZT" is "földszint", literally "ground floor", "MFSZT" is "magasföldszint", "high ground floor" meaning mezzanine level, and "1E" is "1. emelet", "first elevation", so that was highest.
The quality of the elevator still made me think of taking the stairs though.
Fun fact, Hungarian is the only language I've heard of that uses Latin letters and also has multi-glyph letters as long as four glyphs, so "sz" is considered one letter like in Polish I think, but "ddzs" is also one letter.
I've heard that it has the historical explanation that back in time, the ground floor was often literally the ground, so the first floor was actually the first floor. Don't know if that's correct, but I seem to remember having heard/read it somewhere.
It might be, the whole étage thing has been loanworded to hell by a lot of languages, it might come from that.
Ah so they don't call floors floors...they call the space floor.
Which is completely dumb haha.
They might call it "first elevation" for example.
It's just different words.
More or less everybody except US and Russia has zero floor, counting in big office buildings is fun: 3,2,1,-1,-2, I know... The concept of a number zero is not that old (couple hundred years, don't remember the details), but should be enough to update your language :-*
0 is a couple of centuries old?!?!!!!?
You may want to check that one out, you may be missing a zero somewhere there...
Let me Google that for you:
Yes ok, a couple more than a could, but definitively not an order of magnitude...
That is literally an order of magnitude
If you choose to believe so, I'm not gonna argue on that.
We usually do B1, B2 etc. for "basement levels" rather than negative numbers. But if there's just one then it's usually "basement" with no number.
We count the same as the US in Norway
Interesting, in Denmark we count the same as the Brits
I see. Weird that our so similar languages differ like this. But our counting systems are also vastly different, so maybe it isn't so weird anyway?
Sometimes we can have the entrance in a basement which would then be denoted as the basement and not the first floor. I guess the basement example is when what the british names ground floor is partially underground. In all other cases our first floor is where the main entrance is.
Therefore "more or less" ;) of course I didn't make a study on it, just traveled a bunch of countries and only in thosei noticed it... Needing to add that this is not something that would jump in my eye first time I visit a county.
On a side note: in Germany, we use the -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 scheme, bit most of the times they write it more clear with: 1. OG (first upper floor), EG (ground floor), 1. UG (First lower floor). I think "upper" and "lower" is not a good translation, but I'm now to tired to think of someone better suiting
Kind of, yes, but I feel the Norwegian word "etasje" is better translated to "storey" than "floor". Taking that translation, we're saying "first storey, second storey, etc." rather than "first floor, second floor, etc." which I guess everybody can agree makes sense.
It gets worse after the 12th floor where American buildings skip the 13th floor because it’s bad luck.
This probably used to be way more common, like when skyscrapers first became a thing, but I'm an American and was recently in an elevator that had the 13th floor button. It's definitely not a universal truth or like a building code violation or anything
13th floor is probably where the secret agents spy on all the other floors.
They are just trying reverse psychology by showing the button now.
Might be a fake 13. They’ll have a button for 13 in the elevator, but 14 actually gives you 13, 15 gives you 14, etc. That way nobody ever thinks they’re on 13, and the fake button convinces them that there is in fact a 13th floor. Or 13 is a mechanical floor.
You can only believe that if you haven't used the stairs once.
Only in old buildings.
A bunch of new apartment buildings I visit don't GAF.
Don't forget the mezzanine. Super bon bon!
If I stole Somebody else’s wave to fly up
If I rose up Up with the avenue behind me
Everyone ,don't sleep on soul coughing
Anything else of theirs besides Super Bon Bon I should check out? Super Bon Bon is a banger.
Screenwriter's Blues always hits for me, Bus To Beelzebub too. Dreams Of Witchita... Honestly, they put out albums that were worth listening to beginning to end.
Circles had some decent radio play
Erdgeschoss, same here.
True, but also 1. Obergeschoss, 2. Obergeschoss etc.
In German there was the "ground-floor, the upper-floor and the roof-floor", which then got separated into "ground floor, upper floor 1, upper floor 2... "
Zero-indexed versus one-indexed. You all know which is the right one
Not counting the mezzanine
This is surprisingly annoying where I live and some houses use the British way and everyone uses the American way in speech.
We live on the American second floor. So whenever someone new comes to visit there is no easy answer to where our apartment is: if I tell them we are on the first floor, they won’t find us looking on the ground floor. If I say come to the second floor, they may use the elevator and press 2 which will then take them to the third floor.
Happens almost every time I’m not specific enough.
"I live one floor up" doesn't work?
I like ground being 0. That way you have a continuous number line from basement to the top:
-2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5
In Europe a lot of countries name the "ground level" floor something because historically "zero" was a bad number, so they instead called it something else because the logic was to start at 0.
It's kinda like how some buildings in the USA exclude the 13th floor.
Little fun fact btw - the whole foods database used to exclude Friday the 13th. Found this out when I worked there and was trying to show my receipt for something I got, and when the manager looked, we couldn't find it. Then another coworker came in and brought up something they brought up the day before and it couldn't be found either.
After a bit, we found it Thursday 12th, but then when scrolling saw it skipped Friday 13th and instead went straight to Saturday 14th.
honestly it's a terrible number.
0/10
Americans are not consistent about this either
So the "second story" is "floor 1"? That seems odd.
Speaking of that, you could have also had "stories" vs "storeys" in this.
I don't think anybody says that
As some one outside both countries 1 2 3 4 5 is where it's at. The second floor being the first makes no sense.
German counts floors like the british with the lowest being the ground floor (Erdgeschoss) and then counting the Upstairs floors.
I'd be curious how that is in other languages.
International people in the comments:
Tell me how you count floors
Malaysia: With numbers
English is my second language. I use both.
If this was a taller building, the terms would match up once the Americans skip referencing a 13th floor
I live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.
So annoying.
This is where it’s a benefit to live in a hilly area. For a building on a hill, it’s quite normal to enter on a different floor depending on whether you’re on an uphill side or downhill side. The main entrance to my son’s dorm is the third floor
I just assume the Brits are on a hill or slightly tilted
Ok so I need some clarification. Building has a crawlspace so there are a few steps up to the front door (please don't tell me the front has some weird name too), so the entrance level isn't necessarily the ground level what do you do?
Option 2 the building is built on uneven ground so the front entrance is ground level but the back entrance is on the floor below the entrance level. How do you number that?
For simplicity sake front refers to street view side and back is the opposite of front.
Most of EU, that I’ve been to. Ground, first, second.
I think it's the US that's the outlier, most European languages have it so that the first floor is the first floor above the ground floor.
It's highly unlikely that they adopted the British system.
The names for "floor" or "story" stem in many languages from the way houses were built in antiquity and the medieval period. Brick or stone walls for a base house that could be updated with wooden floors on top. Or variations in material, whatever.
The baseline is, those words come from material reality and exist in many languages and cultures and are not adopted from English.
The island of great Britain was highly uninfluential in antiquity and the middle ages.
Same thing in Spain
do Brits skip 13?
The Americans might be right on this one. Perhaps if we give them this one they will give us the metric system.
Where are the stairs going in that picture? They just make everything more confusing. They seem to go exactly between two levels and not on the bottom level like a normal-ass building.
They lead to the mind of John Malkovich
I wish it was this clear cut in the states. Motherfucking builders treat this like guidelines and I'm never sure what button I need to press to be able to walk outside.
In the US, the button that takes you to the ground floor that you can walk out of will have a star on it.
Only have that problem on buildings on a slope where the ground exit can be on multiple floors. It's usually starred.
If the building is on a slope it might be different floors!
If there's a window, you can walk outside from any floor.
The benefit of starting the number at 1 is the majority of apartment blocks and hotels can have 4 digit room numbers with the first digit representing the floor it's on.
E.g. room 4201 is on 4th floor and 1691 is on 1st floor
Room 0123 isn't an option? With 0 being the ground floor?
It's not the zeroth floor, it's the ground floor. G123.
0451
I like this system, but only above ground. I had a meeting room that was in 0008 and that just hurts to say verbally.
On the second floor you would say something like twenty-o-eight.
"Room eight"
"Room two thousand eight"
This makes pointer arithmetic much easier, but pointing arithmetic much harder.
The simple difference between ordinal and cardinal numbering.
Both are ordinal. One just start with 0 and the other with 1.
Americans use cardinal numbering for floors. How many you got? One, two, three. Europeans use ordinal numbering. They start at the ground (0) and count up from there.
Cardinal refers to number, while ordinal refers to sequence. Both American & British systems are ordinal, since changing the order of the floor numbers would make no sense. If they were cardinal, the order would be irrelevant.
Personally, I prefer the American system, since the bottom floor is what you enter on, and is therefore the first floor you interact with.
You're wrong about that, cardinal numbers are still ordered. You can't have Charles the Third come before Charles the Second (but there is no Charles the Zeroth).
Cardinal numbers refer to the size of a set. (10 apples in a basket) Ordinal numbers refer to the order of elements in a set (third apple put into the basket) you can rearrange an ordered set and retain the same cardinality (ten apples in the basket) but you'd change the order of the elements (switch the third and sixth apple).
The floor number you're on is an ordinal number. You can rearrange the elements while retaining the cardinality of the set, (the total number of floors does not change) but the order of the set is changed (the third floor is switched with the sixth floor).
Hope that clears up the confusion. Have a nice day.
Cardinal numerals refer to amount (one, two, three) and ordinal refers to a position in a sequence (first, second, third). So your example is ordinal not cardinal.
It depends on the convention whether enumerating starts with the zeroth or first. In programming for example indices commonly start at zero. And the numbering of floors is another example of where starting at zero is quite common.
The 0 floor?
I remember it by pretending that the Brits require kindergarten and Americans don't.
For people that start at 1: what do you call the basement floors?
-1, -2, -3,... (JK) But not quite, we just call them B1, B2, and so on.
B# (eg. B1, B2, B3, etc...)
The brits got it right.
Yeah always call the second thing the first.
Why wont you call the first floor first floor? Is ground floor not a floor? Do you also write the day like month/day/year ?
Yes, the ground floor is a floor: the ground floor. Also, we do call the first floor the first floor.....
But it's the 2nd floor. The ground floor is the first floor
The ground floor can't be the first floor, silly. The ground already existed, before they made the building. You don't magically go up a floor just because there's a roof over your head.
Youre still on the ground, not the first floor above the ground. You guys are wild.
I always explained this difference between floor numbers in my country and the US by language: in my language the word used for upper floors only means upper floors, so the 1st floor has to be above the ground floor; while in English they're all floors, so ground floor is the first floor.
But I didn't know the British use the same system as my country (and most of Europe afaik). They could've just adopted the same system, despite language, for consistency.
Arrays start at 0.
Floors don't.
Are you ever zeroeth in line? What’s the zeroeth thing you do after waking up in the morning? Do you ever launch an argument with “Zeroeth of all…”? Do you remember your child’s zeroeth words or the time they took their zeroeth step or their zeroeth day of school?
Because it’s a ground level.
Yes, correct, the first floor is at ground level. When you place another level above that first floor, it is a second floor.
A single story structure has a floor, it's first floor, and no other.
Yes, a single storey does have a floor. We call it the ground.
But it's not ground it's a floor. Ground is dirt
Isn’t that earth? Not Earth.
It's floor 0. Like you aren't 1 year old, when you arr born.
That makes sense if you are counting but i prefer a description. If you are in a building with only one floor, you are at the first floor. There is no such thing as the zeroth floor. Because it is the first floor you see and grasp its existence. Its the first thing you see. There is no such thing as the zeroth. Zero implies nonexistence. You cannot use it when you are counting things that exist. Another example: ln a race there is first, second and third. Who would the zeroth refer to? It would have to refer to the last person who has crossed the line without participating in the race. He might have crossed the line before the first but he does not exist in the race so he does not get a reward.
The word for floors in my native language is the same as the word for "upstairs". And it's the same in a lot of European languages (French étage). And the ground floor has its own separate word. Using French as an example again, the word is parterre, literally meaning "on the ground". So numbering in Europe goes ground floor, first floor, and so on. Now in English, the word being the same, it can sound confusing, but I assume the British just adopted the same system as the rest of Europe for consistency (although they're not usually known for doing that).
Floor 0 is for those weird buildings built on uneven ground where you enter floor 1 from one side, but floor 0 from another, so it's neither really underground to warrant negative floor number, nor is it fully on the ground to be positive.
In Hungary, we also have a base floor depending on the building, as some are built on a mountain side.
Yeah England loses this round.
Hey thanks. It's strange, every time I think about looking that up, I get side tracked or something. Thanks for doing the leg work.
The least hilarious debate this week.
You don't start counting at 0, so going with Americans on this.
Ground is not a floor - i think this is related to age if the languages. In Norway we refer to story and avoid confusion altogether. If its on the 2nd story you press two on the elevator, or walk because you’re not made of cheeseburgers or fish’n’crisps.
Is it a space you occupy? Yes, it is. That makes it a floor that exists that you occupy. It does not need to be elevated to be a floor.
Ever drop your food on the floor? Do you need to be elevated to drop your food on the floor?
Back in the days the ground floor was dirt.
And it was still a floor
Oh you said floor. That makes it a floor that exists. You start counting at 1, not at 0.
Jeg kunne godt sagt noe annet siden engelsk ikke er mitt morsmål. Men fint du fikk utløp for dine pedantiske sider
Ok...
floor /flôr/ noun
Well that's respectful. Not.
Should I reply in Klingon?
Ground floor is 0.
It is depicted like that in the elevators. First floor above is 1, first floor below is -1.
Doesn't American go from -1 directly to 1? Skipping 0 entirely?
And you don't start counting at 0, so anything being counted as 0 makes no sense. 0 literally means 0, does not exist.
Basements are usually B1, B2, B3, etc.
It's definitely not consistent in the states. We use both.
Edit: Oh wait, ground to first? Every time I hear a Brit make fun of the US I have to wonder what crack he's on to lack the self awareness. That's idiotic.
Finally a metric we can agree on "the Americans" do better?! World peace is possible!
Americans have no concept of zero.
Wait. I am pretty sure that i live in America, and here the buildings start at zero. 012 denotes room 12 on floor zero. Room 112 is the first floor room 12 and so on.
Room 112 is on ground level at every hotel I can remember, including on a trip last month. Well, it would have been on the ground level but that floor is all lobby and conference rooms so the lowest toom number was 201 and was on the second floor.
Previous buildings with rooms on the ground level were the 100s.
The building i am in right now has the elevator list the ground floor as G and the next floor up as 1. I can see that there is really no consistency. In buildings that have the ground floor as 1…. Are their basements listed as 0? It can’t be G for sure. Or do they skip right to -1?
I've seen B and SB (basement and subbasement) on elevator buttons. Generally those are floors that the public isn't allowed to go to and I never had the right key to activate them so I don't know what was there.
I've also seen B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 for different basement levels, though I don't remember which was on top. Those were all parking levels though so no rooms were numbered.
Basements are numbered increasingly as they travel away from the ground floor. This is code for elevators at least, in most municipalities in the US.
Are you in the US, and what kind of building is it?
I don't ever remember seeing a separate ground and 1st floor in a building, although I haven't been in every building.
I've seen it once, the building was built on a hill, so both ground and 1st had street level entrances on opposite sides.
You just triggered a flashback about a weird parking garage that had Ground between P1 and P2 so that it would line up with the hotel's Ground floor!
It went:
Now that you mention the slopes, I do have a fuzzy recollection of a building on a slope having a separate Ground floor from the numbered floors for street level access. 1st floor was the main lobby.
I can't think of one on flat ground ever having separate Ground and 1st floors though.
Usually I’ve seen rooms starting with zero as a basement level, although due to terrain (such as being on a hillside) there could still be direct access to the outside ground. This is especially the case in residential/apartment buildings where windows and direct emergency egress is legally required. Things get wacky when the terrain around a building is not uniformly flat. It can be even weirder in big cities like New York where there might be an entrance at the street level but the hotel reception is up a level because the entrance to a parking garage is at the street level, then above the lobby level there’s maybe a mezzanine level with conference rooms, and then above that is the floor where rooms start and while an American might call that floor 4 or a European would call it floor 3, it might be labeled in the elevator as floor 1, 2, 3, or 4.
The things I have always seen as consistent in the US is whatever number a hotel room starts with is the number you press in the elevator. If you’re in room 647 press floor 6; if you’re in room 1232 press floor 12. Also, whatever level has a star ⭐️ in the elevator is the floor they consider the level with the main entrance. You’ll find the reception/front desk there and it should be obvious where to go for a taxi. It might not be the level to go out if you’ve parked a car, though, especially if the hotel has a parking garage.