This is a bigger culture shock than the metric vs imperial system to me.

I learned this when I was a wee lad: I was playing Runescape and trying to solve a quest I was stuck on with a walkthrough. The guide said that the macguffin was on the first floor of some building, and I must have spent hours looking on the ground floor with no luck.

I finally asked my big brother for help and he said, "Have you tried looking upstairs?" And there it was, blew my mind.

I'm American and I often think we do things wrong...

but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It's just wrong.

In the US we use either 1st floor and Ground floor to refer to the same floor. The second and higher floors are consistently named though, except for those buildings that skip the 13th floor.

Distribution of the two (pink is mixed) from Wikipedia:

Never understood how ground floor and first floor aren't always synonymous. If the ground floor is a floor, then how could it not be the first of the floors?

In German we call the floors "Geschoss" we have "Erdgeschoss" (earth-floor) and then "Obergeschoss" (above-floor) "Untergeschoss" (under-floor). So you have the ground floor called EG, above it is 1.OG then 2.OG, etc. From the EG downwards there is the 1.UG and further down the 2.UG, etc.

With this terminology there can't be any confusion, because there needs to be a reference floor from which to count up and down. Lucky us.

Not exclusive to UK or US; here in Brazil me and my wife are from neighboring states and have this same difference in floor naming.

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 :-*

Me: What is this we're standing on?

Patrick: The floor.

Me: And if I go up the stairs, what will I be standing on?

Patrick: The floor.

Me: So there is a floor above this one?

Patrick: Yes.

Me: And in order, that floor upstairs would come after this one?

Patrick: Yes.

Me: So, that would make it the second floor I've touched after coming inside?

Patrick: Yes.

Me: So which floor are we on now?

Patrick: Ground floor.

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 would be okay with this if Britain started with the zeroth floor.

I didn't know they used 0-indexed buildings in ingerland

British use 0 indexing? Never thought about it like that huh

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

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.

The older buildings in Hong Kong often need to clarify this to avoid mix ups. Back in the day it's not uncommon to see signs advertising a business on the 3rd floor of a building, for example, to have 3 樓 2字 (3rd floor, number 2) to tell people they're on the 3rd floor but you need the press the 2 button in the lift. Also some (most? all?) skip the 4th floor for bad luck.

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."

The brits got it right.

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.

It gets worse after the 12th floor where American buildings skip the 13th floor because it’s bad luck.

Wait until you reach the 13th floor

Don't forget the mezzanine. Super bon bon!

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.

Erdgeschoss, same here.

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

Zero-indexed versus one-indexed. You all know which is the right one

Not counting the mezzanine

In Europe a lot of countries name the "ground level" floor something because historically "zero" was a bad number, so they instead called it something else because the logic was to start at 0.

It's kinda like how some buildings in the USA exclude the 13th floor.

Little fun fact btw - the whole foods database used to exclude Friday the 13th. Found this out when I worked there and was trying to show my receipt for something I got, and when the manager looked, we couldn't find it. Then another coworker came in and brought up something they brought up the day before and it couldn't be found either.

After a bit, we found it Thursday 12th, but then when scrolling saw it skipped Friday 13th and instead went straight to Saturday 14th.

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.

This is surprisingly annoying where I live and some houses use the British way and everyone uses the American way in speech.

We live on the American second floor. So whenever someone new comes to visit there is no easy answer to where our apartment is: if I tell them we are on the first floor, they won’t find us looking on the ground floor. If I say come to the second floor, they may use the elevator and press 2 which will then take them to the third floor.

Happens almost every time I’m not specific enough.

Americans are not consistent about this either

The benefit of starting the number at 1 is the majority of apartment blocks and hotels can have 4 digit room numbers with the first digit representing the floor it's on.

E.g. room 4201 is on 4th floor and 1691 is on 1st floor

I like ground floor as well....1st floor is ground floor.

German counts floors like the british with the lowest being the ground floor (Erdgeschoss) and then counting the Upstairs floors.

I'd be curious how that is in other languages.

International people in the comments:
Tell me how you count floors

You don't start counting at 0, so going with Americans on this.

The Americans might be right on this one. Perhaps if we give them this one they will give us the metric system.

If this was a taller building, the terms would match up once the Americans skip referencing a 13th floor

So the "second story" is "floor 1"? That seems odd.

Speaking of that, you could have also had "stories" vs "storeys" in this.

Yeah England loses this round.

English is my second language. I use both.

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.

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

I live under the British system (Australia) of floor naming.

So annoying.

I wish it was this clear cut in the states. Motherfucking builders treat this like guidelines and I'm never sure what button I need to press to be able to walk outside.

Same thing in Spain

do Brits skip 13?

Where are the stairs going in that picture? They just make everything more confusing. They seem to go exactly between two levels and not on the bottom level like a normal-ass building.

Finally a metric we can agree on "the Americans" do better?! World peace is possible!

The simple difference between ordinal and cardinal numbering.

This makes pointer arithmetic much easier, but pointing arithmetic much harder.

It's definitely not consistent in the states. We use both.

Edit: Oh wait, ground to first? Every time I hear a Brit make fun of the US I have to wonder what crack he's on to lack the self awareness. That's idiotic.

In Hungary, we also have a base floor depending on the building, as some are built on a mountain side.

For people that start at 1: what do you call the basement floors?

I remember it by pretending that the Brits require kindergarten and Americans don't.

The 0 floor?

Hey thanks. It's strange, every time I think about looking that up, I get side tracked or something. Thanks for doing the leg work.

Wait. I am pretty sure that i live in America, and here the buildings start at zero. 012 denotes room 12 on floor zero. Room 112 is the first floor room 12 and so on.