this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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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).
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.