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...
I'm American and I often think we do things wrong...
but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It's just wrong.
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".
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!
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.
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?
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.
Zero-indexed versus one-indexed. You all know which is the right one
Wouldn't a half-basement be 0?
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.
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.
It genuinely seems asinine to me to call the floor above the ground floor the first floor.
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
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've seen multiple hospitals where the floor with the main entrance is 2, those will get the star. So it's more of a "here's how you leave" indicator rather than ground specifically
Yes, that's a good example I've seen too. So was the 2 not the ground floor?
I guess I've also seen places where the terrain is not even, so there are multiple entrances on different levels. I didn't take notice of what the elevators said though.
In the UK most lifts have a G for ground floor.
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
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.
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.
I am from Baltics and always assumed naming 1st floor ground floor was weird. Turns out we are the weird ones.
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.
US, Russia, and China on the same side is weird to see.
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.
"Nth floor above ground"
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.
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
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.
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.
It also depends on native language. In German ground floor is "Erdgeschoß" (earth floor more or less), first floor / American second floor is "1. Obergeschoß" (~first upper floor).
(can also be "1. Stock" (~first floor), very common especially in spoken language since it's shorter, but it also wouldnt make sense if the "1. Obergeschoß" was the "2. Stock" so obviously "1. Obergeschoß" = "1. Stock")
So for me the British system makes much more sense since it makes more sense in German and I grew up with German.
In Sweden and Netherlands we do ground floor, 1, 2, 3 as well.
yes without bias I know they have 32 degrees freezing temp and something like 243.7 as boiling temp, and 12 inchs as 1 foot, and 1 lbs is like 2.2 of water required for heating up 1.018 energy and all are messed up, but at least they call the first floor first floor, and second floor second fucking floor upstairs. for some reason ground floor implies basement to me
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 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.
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.
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... "
Do "2-story" homes in England actually have 3 floors?
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.
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.
Wait until you reach the 13th floor
14th floor, you know what’s up.
Jump out the window, you will die earlier!
I live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.
So annoying.
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...
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:
- early mentionetd of the concept of void in India Like 2k years ago*
- "In the 9th century, during the intellectual flourishing of the Islamic Golden Age, zero became fully integrated into mathematics. "*
- adoption to Europe around 12th century*
Yes ok, a couple more than a could, but definitively not an order of magnitude...
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
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.
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.
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.
But you can have multiple levels of basement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
do Brits skip 13?
Nope. We have floors of 13s.
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
I like ground floor as well....1st floor is ground floor.
Seems like Brazil adopted the British system, at least the buildings I went: here, the immediate floor is called "Térreo" (Ground), followed by "primeiro andar" ("First floor") and so on.
Most of EU, that I’ve been to. Ground, first, second.
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.
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.
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
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
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
In Hungary, we also have a base floor depending on the building, as some are built on a mountain side.
In the US, when a building is built into a hill, or mountain side, like that, all the floors are numbered 1 through whatever, and then there will be labels to where the the floors, with exits, let you out.
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 0 floor?
In Europe most languages have a different word for the floors above the ground floor.
This makes pointer arithmetic much easier, but pointing arithmetic much harder.
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.
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 least hilarious debate this week.
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 ?
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.
Finally a metric we can agree on "the Americans" do better?! World peace is possible!
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.
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?
There's not usually a 0 (at least in Canada). Ground floor is 1 or G. The floor above that is 2. Basement is B, or if there's multiple basements, B1 then B2, B3, etc.
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.
Yeah England loses this round.
Americans have no concept of zero.
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.
