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”
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
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.
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?
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.
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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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 live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.
So annoying.
This is where it’s a benefit to live in a hilly area. For a building on a hill, it’s quite normal to enter on a different floor depending on whether you’re on an uphill side or downhill side. The main entrance to my son’s dorm is the third floor
I just assume the Brits are on a hill or slightly tilted
Ok so I need some clarification. Building has a crawlspace so there are a few steps up to the front door (please don’t tell me the front has some weird name too), so the entrance level isn’t necessarily the ground level what do you do?
Option 2 the building is built on uneven ground so the front entrance is ground level but the back entrance is on the floor below the entrance level. How do you number that?
For simplicity sake front refers to street view side and back is the opposite of front.
