English is my second language. I use both.
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
In Sweden, maybe the rest of the EU, the entrance floor (entrevåning) has a green ring around it.
I’ve seen it in most European countries
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.
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
#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!
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…
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.
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.
If the building is on a slope it might be different floors!
If there’s a window, you can walk outside from any floor.
Only have that problem on buildings on a slope where the ground exit can be on multiple floors. It’s usually starred.
In the US, the button that takes you to the ground floor that you can walk out of will have a star on it.
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.
Yeah England loses this round.
If this was a taller building, the terms would match up once the Americans skip referencing a 13th floor
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.
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
Well that’s respectful. Not.
Should I reply in Klingon?
Ok…
floor /flôr/ noun
The surface of a room on which one stands.
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.
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.
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 English system, and Finland and Norway using the British system.
Did you mean to say American for one of those systems? England is part of Great Britain.
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…
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
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.
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.
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
This makes pointer arithmetic much easier, but pointing arithmetic much harder.
I’m American and I often think we do things wrong…
but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It’s just wrong.
Arrays start at 0
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.
Array offsets start at zero. Indices start at one. Normal humans that aren’t stuck in CS101 count with indices.
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.
it’s floor. That was built. It isn’t the ground
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.
It’s the first upstairs.
Right, the first floor after you ascend from the… Initial floor, which is on the ground, QED.
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.
They don’t though, they start with B1, B2, B3…
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.