I still don’t know if it goes ground floor, second floor or ground floor, first floor, second floor
Red has first floor = ground floor. Blue has first floor above ground floor.
They are on stilts - you can walk underneath the first floor!
The US base calls them first level and second level. The British base calls them operational level and upper level.
I think it depends on the convention used in each country, so there isn’t one global correct answer.
In Britain the convention is Ground, 1st Floor, 2nd Floor.
TIL. Living in the states I thought the answer is obviously that the ground floor and first floor are synonymous.
Agreed. For the other side of the Atlantic, it is ground or 1st floor, 2nd floor.
Makes sense for numbering floors - ground is zero. How many floors should there be between -1 and 2?
If you’re presuming ground is zero then you’ve told us the answer you want already. Are you numbering the floors or numbering the stories? That’s the real question.
What century is it if the year is 500? First century. What about if the year is -500 (500 BCE)? It’s the first century BCE. You have now arrived at US numbering of “floors”.
Now which century is zeroth? It doesn’t make sense to ask, just like having a floor numbered “zero”. This might be why the ground floor is not special to us.
I agree with the UK one as in Spain we do pretty much the same.
My North American mind cannot comprehend the UK version.
“First” floor implies it is the first one. Why does the ground floor get special treatment?
And the fourth floor, it’s the fourth one because there are four of them.
Other countries treat the question more as “how many floors from the ground are you?” than what you’re used to. After all, what floor is 0?
My inner computer scientist likes this framing, and understands its logic. My inner, and much less influential human being, hates it a lot AF.
To reach the 2nd floor you need to go up 2 floors
To reach the 1st floor you need to go up 1 floor
If you go up 0 floors, you’re on floor 0 - aka the ground floor.
The ground floor is still a floor of the building, and it’s the first one you encounter. To me they are interchangeable.
In an elevator, or I guess a lift, what do the buttons that select floors represent the ground floor with? A ‘G’? A “0”?
Arrays are indexed from zero - the UK has the only correct naming approach.
So youre telling me you have 3 cookies in front of you, you’d call them the zeroth, first and second cookies?
Someone asks what cookie youre on and you say second having already eaten 2.5?
Because it has a special place, i.e. it’s leveled with the ground, so anything above it you need to climb up, anything below it you need to climb down.
Think of it this way, floor is a synonym with level, if I asked you to tell me which level the ground is at the only logical answer is 0, if you say the ground is at level 1 that implies that the first basement is level 0 which sounds ridiculous.
If you’re in an elevator that has the numbers from -5 to 15, where is the only logical place for the ground to be at?
So to preface this, it’s all arbitrary so there isn’t a right or wrong as long as it’s consistent.
The question might be better phrased this way: are we numbering distance or counting spaces?
If the year is 2024, what century is it? How about if the year is 700? How about if the year is "-700” (700 BCE)? Now which century is the zero century? 🤔 It doesn’t make sense to ask I don’t think.
So really the US System counts the spaces up, then the spaces down as stories. Ground is the same as 1, and Basement is same as -1. I have never ever seen a building (or elevator) with a number line in it or with negative numbers. NOW if you put altitude in the elevator in, say, 10ft increments or so, I would have no choice but to agree with your strange European ways.
No storey is special, no one is special.
Imo the first floor should be the ground floor and the floor above that is the second floor.
I’m pretty sure that format or where the first floor is labeled “1” is the most common where I live.
Labeling the second floor the first floor is frankly insane.
Edit: or maybe we do call the second floor the first floor. Not sure. Still stupid though but it’s not as stupid in my language because we don’t say “floor” but if you’re going to say floor you should count the actual floors.
It depends on where you are.
When using the English word ‘floor’ counting ground floor as ‘first floor’ makes sense – ground level still has a floor and it is the first one, but it is still counted differently in different English-speaking countries. Other languages (at least Polish) have separate word for ‘non-ground level of the building’ so those are counted.
In Polish we have the word ‘parter’ for the ground floor (lowest non-basement level of the building) and ‘piętro’ for any level above it. So it is: (‘piwnica’ (basement), ) ‘parter’, ‘1 piętro’, ‘2 piętro’… This makes complete sense… but I still remember it being confusing when I was a kid. A ‘floor’ (the bottom of a room) is ‘podłoga’.
So, answering the question: there are three ‘podłogas’ under the second ‘piętro’ here.
In addition to that, in Czech we sometimes just call what would be the first floor above ground level “mezanin” and shift everything up by one more level, though it’s becoming rare. In the house where I live they got rid of this last time they replaced the elevator. I’ve been joking that they forced me to move up from 2nd to 3rd floor with it.
