this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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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 1β¦
This array has 4 elements despite the last element only being at index position 3.
A β2-storyβ 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.
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.