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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

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 like ground floor as well....1st floor is ground floor.

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.

So the "second story" is "floor 1"? That seems odd.

Speaking of that, you could have also had "stories" vs "storeys" in this.

Americans are not consistent about this either

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 floors

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.

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.