I didn’t know they used 0-indexed buildings in ingerland
Zero-indexed versus one-indexed. You all know which is the right one
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)
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
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
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.”
Funny how their first isn’t first.
“Nth floor above ground”
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.
Can you imagine if we skipped 13 in our code and said screw it let’s go 1-based, too ?
257.257.257.0
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.
Don’t forget the mezzanine. Super bon bon!
If I stole Somebody else’s wave to fly up
If I rose up Up with the avenue behind me
Everyone ,don’t sleep on soul coughing
Anything else of theirs besides Super Bon Bon I should check out? Super Bon Bon is a banger.
Screenwriter’s Blues always hits for me, Bus To Beelzebub too. Dreams Of Witchita… Honestly, they put out albums that were worth listening to beginning to end.
Circles had some decent radio play
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
Hey! Common ground.
Wait til you find out what language they speak…
British English and something as unintelligible as Austrian German, but it’s called Australian English.
But if they said “my bedroom is on the 2nd floor” what would you think?
Your house probably had a loft extension to add another floor, or you live in one of those tall townhouses that are three stories so they can fit more over priced new builds onto a tiny estate with no parking.
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Then we would think it’s a three-storey building. Really don’t see the issue with calling the ground level what it is. The ground floor is zero levels above the ground. The first floor is one level above the ground. Think of it like this: how many flights of stairs does it take to get to that floor?
Example: my local hospital lists a ward I visited as being on the second floor, therefore you go up two flights of stairs to get to it.
I think of the first literal floor at the bottom of the building as the first floor, because it’s the first floor I see and touch when entering the building. Then when I go up 1 staircase, I encounter the second floor I have seen in that building, so I think of it as the second floor. 1 floor + 1 flight of stairs = 2 total floors, and I’m now standing on the second of those 2.
Saying ground floor feels weird to me because it’s not associated with a number, it’s a G, when every other floor of the building is associated with a number. I’ve never used G to represent 1 or 0 in any other context.
It’s literally just two correct but different ways of looking at something and we can talk in circles about it all day. If I had grown up outside of the US, I’m sure calling the first floor the ground floor would make more sense to me.
Growing up in a “ground floor” country, the British way feels very natural to me. Which floor do I first encounter when I climb up the stairs? The first one! I guess you can also think of the ground floor as its own thing, since it is unelevated.
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.
Seems needlessly obtuse. A 2 story house has 2 stories, so I go upstairs to the second story. Not a hill I’m going to die on, nor a thing that I’ve ever an iota of trouble with when traveling. I’ve never really understood why people get so twisted about what another country uses. Difference is one of the big things that makes travel fun, or at least interesting.
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.
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What is a single floor home called then? A flat?
A flat is an apartment.
I (American living in London for more than a decade) don’t think I’ve ever seen a detached single story house before. There might be a name but they’re rare enough that I’ve never heard it before.
Bungalow. I don’t think you’ll find many in London.
Interesting, thanks. Bungalow in the US would usually mean something like quaint. Where as you can also have a “ranch” house in the US which is a single story usually with a large open floor plan.
A bungalow
And yes it is weird.
A bangla house was one in the Bengali style. Those were single story buildings the colonial British encountered in India.
So it became the posh way of saying “single story house” and then everyone started using it. Because it’s better to say you’re choosing not to build extra stories than saying you can’t afford them.
Erdgeschoss, same here.
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… "
Wait until you reach the 13th floor
14th floor, you know what’s up.
Jump out the window, you will die earlier!
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…
Let me Google that for you:
- early mentionetd of the concept of void in India Like 2k years ago*
- "In the 9th century, during the intellectual flourishing of the Islamic Golden Age, zero became fully integrated into mathematics. "*
- adoption to Europe around 12th century*
Yes ok, a couple more than a could, but definitively not an order of magnitude…
That is literally an order of magnitude
If you choose to believe so, I’m not gonna argue on that.
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
Therefore “more or less” ;) of course I didn’t make a study on it, just traveled a bunch of countries and only in thosei noticed it… Needing to add that this is not something that would jump in my eye first time I visit a county.
On a side note: in Germany, we use the -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 scheme, bit most of the times they write it more clear with: 1. OG (first upper floor), EG (ground floor), 1. UG (First lower floor). I think “upper” and “lower” is not a good translation, but I’m now to tired to think of someone better suiting
Interesting, in Denmark we count the same as the Brits
I see. Weird that our so similar languages differ like this. But our counting systems are also vastly different, so maybe it isn’t so weird anyway?
Sometimes we can have the entrance in a basement which would then be denoted as the basement and not the first floor. I guess the basement example is when what the british names ground floor is partially underground. In all other cases our first floor is where the main entrance is.
Kind of, yes, but I feel the Norwegian word “etasje” is better translated to “storey” than “floor”. Taking that translation, we’re saying “first storey, second storey, etc.” rather than “first floor, second floor, etc.” which I guess everybody can agree makes sense.
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.
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.
I actually found this map for it, it’s apparently divided between the world pretty evenly.
I mentioned elsewhere that some stuff is lost in translation here: In Norwegian we don’t say “I’m on the first floor”, we either say “I’m in the first storey” or “I’m on the ground-level”. For subsequent floors we use “I’m in X storey”. I don’t know how this works in other languages, but it would be strange if Norwegian was the only language where we use the storey to specify where something is, rather than the floor (i.e. using “in” rather than “on”).
Well Sweden is wrong already :-)
But you can have multiple levels of basement.
And it’s numbered different building to building, sometimes level 1 is nearest to surface, sometimes it’s the deepest one.
And if you think that’s confusing, I’ve ridden this one elevator once, it had four buttons arranged in a square: “P”, “FSZT”, “MFSZT”, “1E”. Guess what order the floors are in.
Fuggit, I needed the exercise from taking the stairs anyways.
This was a building in Budapest, “P” stands for “pince”, as in basement, “FSZT” is “földszint”, literally “ground floor”, “MFSZT” is “magasföldszint”, “high ground floor” meaning mezzanine level, and “1E” is “1. emelet”, “first elevation”, so that was highest.
The quality of the elevator still made me think of taking the stairs though.
Fun fact, Hungarian is the only language I’ve heard of that uses Latin letters and also has multi-glyph letters as long as four glyphs, so “sz” is considered one letter like in Polish I think, but “ddzs” is also one letter.
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.
It might be, the whole étage thing has been loanworded to hell by a lot of languages, it might come from that.
Ah so they don’t call floors floors…they call the space floor.
Which is completely dumb haha.
They might call it “first elevation” for example.
It’s just different words.
I live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.
So annoying.
