Rare Usa-China w.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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I will never accept the second floor as being the first floor
The first floor is the first floor. When you enter a building, there's a floor you encounter first. That's the first floor, obviously. You can't enter a building and then leave the floor you're on to reach the first floor unless the place you entered isn't considered a floor at all.
Most of the time I don't care what conventions people use. No system of measurements is right or wrong, it's all a matter of what you're raised with. But this is one of those cases where the convention used by a lot of people is simply wrong and I won't accept it.
this is why the legend in this map is misleading.
eg, in hungary's case, you'd never have this kind of confusion about the first floor, because of the words used.
so you start building a house by building walls around the ground floor, then you raise a story on top, which is the first lifted thing (that is, it's not on the ground).
so there's no programmer's logic involved, it flows quite naturally from the words we use.
That's not a floor. That's just the ground you walk in on. The floors are the things that are built above it
You don't have a floor on the main level of your house? You're just rawdogging the earth, watching TV with the worms?
Welcome to the UK
That's the ground floor buddy
The ground what? The ground what?
Is this maybe part of the reason? European buildings are so old, the literal ground is the floor. We dig into the ground to make a basement. We pour concrete into/onto the earth to lay bricks on top.
US homes I see are mostly raised wooden floors off the ground. You literally make a first floor, even if it's very close to the ground level.
Wouldn't be too surprised.
I will never accept the first floor as being the second floor.
The ground floor is the ground floor. It is the same level as where you enter and every other floor is relatively up or down from it.
Most of the time I don't care what conventions people use. No system of measurements is right or wrong, it's all a matter of what you're raised with. But this is one of those cases where the convention used by a lot of people is simply wrong and I won't accept it.
The right three systems make sense, the first two are so un-logical they should be banned.
So which one is the first floor you encounter when you enter the building? Do you normally climb a ladder to get in your house, or do you enter your house on the ground floor? Is the ground floor the first floor you encounter when you enter or is it not?
If you take the stair down from the ground floor, the second floor you see is the basement top level. Do you call that the second floor then? Is the order of floors decided by the first guy that walked into the building with floor numbers (after they forgot the 0 sign ofc). Does the floor numbering for each building depend on whether they wanted to start upwards or downwards that day?
Your 'first floor you see' way of thinking only holds up for the ground floor. Meanwhile just pure rational (mathematical even) +/- X from ground floor is logic all the way around
Yes, but that thinking does hold up for that case. If it really bothers you that people take different paths through buildings, then the answer is to strictly stop naming floors sequentially (third floor, fourth floor, …) and only index them (floor 3, floor 4, …). In that case, floor 0 can be wherever you want.
Which floor you encounter 2nd in a building will depend on if you go up or down, sure, but for most buildings, every single person will have the same first floor they enter. It’s ridiculous to have something called the “first floor” that is literally no one’s first floor when there’s a floor that everyone has to enter first.
If you've got a building that has only basement levels aside from the ground floor, I feel like the first basement level being the "second floor" is completely valid. The reason we usually use a different system for basement floors is because there's already a second floor that isn't the first basement level.
If we want to be purely mathematically rational then we're either using the US system where the ground floor is the first floor or we're using the Russian system where the ground floor is floor 0. Either way, we need to acknowledge that the ground floor is the start of the count. You can't just say it's not a floor because it happens to be the place where you entered.
"I won first place!" "congrats to your silver medal. I won 'ground place' and got the gold medal."
"have you ever done this before?" "this is the first time, so I've only done it once before (which is called the ground time)."
January 2 is the first day of the year. January 1? Ground day.
The floor is the ceiling.
Language is weird and develops weird. Acting like there is one "rational" system about things is very weird. Language isn't like that.
the walls are floors too! I'm a gecko btw
No that's the ground. You come in, you are at the grounds, on the ground.
You can call that the ground floor if you like, but when you add a second story to your building, that’s the second floor. It’s fairly common for elevators in the us to be labeled G, 2, 3, 4, …
This whole thing is just because english, the silly language, uses the same word for floor as it does for level of house. It's the second floor but it's the first level, plateau, niveau, whatever
Whatever you call it, I don’t see why the ground level should be a separate concept from all the other levels, and ignored in the numbering system. The difference may be relevant for construction and engineering purposes, but for actually using a building, they’re the same idea.
:ok: Most monolingual shit I ever read. You didn't really understand what I wrote.
I don't see how it makes sense to name something that is a ceiling a "floor", but that's because thats not how its thought about in english
Get rid of the word ‘floor’ if you don’t like it. That’s not the issue. Call them levels if you want, some places do. Other languages have a distinct category for the ground level that separates it from the rest of the building and I’m saying I don’t think that’s necessary or very useful. If a different numbering system works better for another language than awkwardly going against the natural way of speaking, then fine, but it’s not a deficiency of english that we wouldn’t say “a one story building doesn’t have any levels”.
What initiated this discussion was someone saying no other system made sense, I explained why it does, the sense just isn't there in english.
This is the monolingual part lol. Language isn't constructed around productivity or specific usecases.
This reads like you're going
about me calling english silly.
A lot of the discussion in this thread should really be clarified whether it’s english specific, or trying to cover everyone.
I’m not trying to argue languages should be changed based on usefulness, but that english not having a ground level distinction is not a problem. The ‘floor’ double meaning is silly, but I was pushing back on it needing to have a word for elevated levels.
One system for the entire world wouldn’t work unless the way we talk about floor numbers were as decoupled from language as phone numbers, but as long as I can still mock the british I’m good.
If you want to mock someone for numbers, look into what the french are doing
The only "second floor is floor 1" system that's correct is the Russian one, because that's rational mathematical notation.
As someone coming from a ground floor country, I agree, the US system is more intuitive, and should be standard
You mean the *Cuban system?
"A first floor is a first floor. You can't say it's only a ground floor." - TJ "Kefla" Yoshi