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...

#Computergamestaughtmesomething

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

Not always, nothing like the US and inconsistency, I work in the northeast US on a college campus our buildings have G-1-2-3....even the newer buildings follow it.

Relevant Mitch Headberg

It genuinely seems asinine to me to call the floor above the ground floor the first floor.

It's the first upstairs.

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.

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?

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.

Arrays start at 0

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.

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.

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.

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.

Antarctica is mixed... that means there are at least two multifloor buildings there... and they couldn't agree on it

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.

Canada should be mixed or blue.

Make up your mind, Antarctica.

Australia should be mixed. I've seen elevators labelled both ways, and personally I've referred to the ground floor as the 1st my entire life here.

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.

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.

Im Germany, we have an extra word for the (US) first floor: Erdgeschoss. That's why our (US) second floor is labeled 1. Would be weird to skip it.

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.

But it's also quite common to Just say "Stock(werk)". The "1. Stock" is equivalent to the British 1st floor then.

What if there's a hill, but on the ground floor there's an entrance and one the 1OG there's also an entrance? Technically both are at ground level, but one is in the lower part of the hill and the other day the higher part of the hill.

I mention it because there's plenty of buildings like that in Finland

But you would call the item at index zero the "first" element, not the "zeroth" element.

What is -1 + 1? So which floor do you end up on if you go up one floor from the basement?

Edit: but apparently you don’t call those -1, -2, etc, but B1, B2, etc, is that right?

On the ground floor, you're standing on the ground which has been covered by a (hopefully nice) floor.

In Sweden, maybe the rest of the EU, the entrance floor (entrevåning) has a green ring around it.

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 the UK most lifts have a G for ground floor.

And basement levels are into the negatives.

Most of Europe does

Can you imagine if we skipped 13 in our code and said screw it let's go 1-based, too ?
257.257.257.0

Thank you for this clarification. Also threeth, lol.

To add to your confusion, when you add a mezzanine floor to a UK building you get ground floor, mezzanine, first floor, second floor, so the lift buttons go G M 1 2 3...

Now you just stand right in the center of the lobby floor..... Mmmhm, very good, now just stand here a minute... runs outside

Alright, do it! the building, wired up for detonation, implodes in spectacular fashion, collapsing like an accordion

...and that is how we deal with the deranged. We will start to clear debris on Monday, and scheduled to start rebuilding in 6 weeks. Good work everyone.

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.

No. Think of the number as representing how many levels you have to go up.

If you go one level up, then you're on the floor of level 1. etc.

A two-story home would mean you have to go two level up to get to the roof... So it has two floors. i.e. Level 0 and level 1.

Funny how their first isn't first.

"Nth floor above ground"

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

Only in old buildings.

A bunch of new apartment buildings I visit don't GAF.

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.

We count the same as the US in Norway

Rez-de-chaussée is the ground floor in France. Go one level up and you're on premier étage, a.k.a first floor.

In sweden första våningen, a.k.a first floor, is the entry level of the building.

But you can have multiple levels of basement.

I've heard that it has the historical explanation that back in time, the ground floor was often literally the ground, so the first floor was actually the first floor. Don't know if that's correct, but I seem to remember having heard/read it somewhere.

Ah so they don't call floors floors...they call the space floor.

Which is completely dumb haha.

14th floor, you know what’s up.

Jump out the window, you will die earlier!

If I stole Somebody else’s wave to fly up

If I rose up Up with the avenue behind me

Wouldn't a half-basement be 0?

True, but also 1. Obergeschoss, 2. Obergeschoss etc.

In German there was the "ground-floor, the upper-floor and the roof-floor", which then got separated into "ground floor, upper floor 1, upper floor 2... "

"I live one floor up" doesn't work?

honestly it's a terrible number.

0/10

I don't think anybody says that

Malaysia: With numbers

It also depends on native language. In German ground floor is "Erdgeschoß" (earth floor more or less), first floor / American second floor is "1. Obergeschoß" (~first upper floor).

(can also be "1. Stock" (~first floor), very common especially in spoken language since it's shorter, but it also wouldnt make sense if the "1. Obergeschoß" was the "2. Stock" so obviously "1. Obergeschoß" = "1. Stock")

So for me the British system makes much more sense since it makes more sense in German and I grew up with German.

In Sweden and Netherlands we do ground floor, 1, 2, 3 as well.

yes without bias I know they have 32 degrees freezing temp and something like 243.7 as boiling temp, and 12 inchs as 1 foot, and 1 lbs is like 2.2 of water required for heating up 1.018 energy and all are messed up, but at least they call the first floor first floor, and second floor second fucking floor upstairs. for some reason ground floor implies basement to me

Most of EU, that I’ve been to. Ground, first, second.

I think it's the US that's the outlier, most European languages have it so that the first floor is the first floor above the ground floor.

It's highly unlikely that they adopted the British system.

The names for "floor" or "story" stem in many languages from the way houses were built in antiquity and the medieval period. Brick or stone walls for a base house that could be updated with wooden floors on top. Or variations in material, whatever.

The baseline is, those words come from material reality and exist in many languages and cultures and are not adopted from English.

The island of great Britain was highly uninfluential in antiquity and the middle ages.

They lead to the mind of John Malkovich

In the US, the button that takes you to the ground floor that you can walk out of will have a star on it.

Only have that problem on buildings on a slope where the ground exit can be on multiple floors. It's usually starred.

If the building is on a slope it might be different floors!

If there's a window, you can walk outside from any floor.

Room 0123 isn't an option? With 0 being the ground floor?

Except in Spain they use "PB", which makes even less sense unless you know it's planta baja. It'd be better if there were a zero. At least the English use "0" or "G".

Nope. We have floors of 13s.

Both are ordinal. One just start with 0 and the other with 1.

-1, -2, -3,... (JK) But not quite, we just call them B1, B2, and so on.

B# (eg. B1, B2, B3, etc...)

Yeah always call the second thing the first.

Why wont you call the first floor first floor? Is ground floor not a floor? Do you also write the day like month/day/year ?

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.

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.

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?

Room 112 is on ground level at every hotel I can remember, including on a trip last month. Well, it would have been on the ground level but that floor is all lobby and conference rooms so the lowest toom number was 201 and was on the second floor.

Previous buildings with rooms on the ground level were the 100s.