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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.