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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...
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
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.
Right, the first floor after you ascend from the... Initial floor, which is on the ground, QED.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
In Sweden, maybe the rest of the EU, the entrance floor (entrevåning) has a green ring around it.
I didn't know they used 0-indexed buildings in ingerland
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 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.
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.
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.
Do "2-story" homes in England actually have 3 floors?
We use the same thing in Australia as the British and if someone told me they have a 2 story home I would think ground floor and first floor
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.
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."
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
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...
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.
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.