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”
British use 0 indexing? Never thought about it like that huh
But you would call the item at index zero the “first” element, not the “zeroth” element.
I personally call it zeroth index to about confusion, so G floor or even 0 on elevators is akin to that. But yeah, nobody would say it’s the first of all the floors in the building, but not the first floor.
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
I would be okay with this if Britain started with the zeroth floor.
And basement levels are into the negatives.
This is how some lift buttons work in the UK. Admittedly ground is often G, but it’s also often 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.
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… "
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.
Wait until you reach the 13th floor
14th floor, you know what’s up.
Jump out the window, you will die earlier!
I’ve worked in two U.S. buildings with Both ground and first floors. The buildings were built into a hill so street level entered the first floor, but parking entered the ground floor. Very easy to get confused until you figure it out.
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…
