I remember it by pretending that the Brits require kindergarten and Americans don’t.
I’m American and I often think we do things wrong…
but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It’s just wrong.
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.
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.
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.
It’s the first upstairs.
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.
You didn’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.
floor was dirt
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
The surface of a room on which one stands.
Distribution of the two (pink is mixed):
US, Russia, and China on the same side is weird to see.
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.
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!
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
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.
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…
If this was a taller building, the terms would match up once the Americans skip referencing a 13th floor
Don’t forget the mezzanine. Super bon bon!
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
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.
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
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
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 floorsMalaysia: With numbers
Zero-indexed versus one-indexed. You all know which is the right one
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.
On the ground floor, you’re standing on the ground which has been covered by a (hopefully nice) floor.
I live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.
So annoying.
