Understanding Multi Storey Buildings and their nomenclature is a necessary information skill in today’s world. Whether you’re describing a place to someone or you’re inviting someone to visit you, you need to be able to differentiate between the types of buildings you have around you.

A storey (British English) or story (American English), is any level part of a building with a floor that could be used by people (for living, work, storage, recreation, etc.). Plurals for the word are storeys (UK) and stories (US).

The terms floor, level, or deck are used in similar ways, except that it is usual to speak of a “16-storey building”, but “the 16th floor“. The floor at ground or street level is called the “ground floor” (i.e. it needs no number; the floor below it is called “basement”, and the floor above it is called “first”) in many regions. However, in some regions, like the US, ground floor is synonymous with first floor, leading to differing numberings of floors, depending on region – even between different national varieties of English.

The words storey and floor normally exclude levels of the building that are not covered by a roof, such as the terrace on the rooftops of many buildings. Nevertheless, a flat roof on a building is counted as a floor in other languages, for instance dakvloer in Dutch, literally “roof-floor”, simply counted one level up from the floor number that it covers.

A two-storey house or home extension is sometimes referred to as double-storey in the UK, while one storey is referred to as single-storey.

Houses commonly have only one or two floors, although three- and four-storey houses also exist. Buildings are often classified as low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise according to how many levels they contain, but these categories are not well-defined. A single-storey house is often referred to, particularly in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, as a bungalow. The tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa, also has the greatest number of storeys with 163.

The height of each storey is based on the ceiling height of the rooms plus the thickness of the floors between each pane. Generally this is around 4.3 m (14 ft) total; however, it varies widely from just under this figure to well over it. Storeys within a building need not be all the same height—often the lobby is taller, for example.

One review of tall buildings suggests that residential towers may have 3.1 m (10 ft 2 in) floor height for apartments, while a commercial building may have floor height of 3.9 m (12 ft 9.5 in) for the storeys leased to tenants. In such tall buildings (60 or more storeys), there may be utility floors of greater height.

Additionally, higher levels may have less floor area than the ones beneath them (e.g., the Willis Tower).

In English the principal floor or main floor of a house is the floor that contains the chief apartments; it is usually the ground floor, or the floor above. In Italy the main floor of a home was traditionally above the ground level and was called the piano nobile (“noble floor”).

The attic or loft is a storey just below the roof of the building; its ceiling is often pitched and/or at a different height from that of other floors. A penthouse is a luxury apartment on the topmost storey of a building. A basement is a storey below the main or ground floor; the first (or only) basement of a home is also called the lower ground floor.

Split-level homes have floors that are offset from each other by less than the height of a full storey. A mezzanine, in particular, is typically a floor halfway between.

Numbering

Floor numbering is the numbering scheme used for a building’s floors. There are two major schemes in use across the world. In the first system, used in such countries as the United States, Canada, China, Japan, Norway, Russia, and other ex-Soviet states, the number of floors is counted literally; that is, when one enters a building through the ground-level front door, one walks quite literally on the first floor; the storey above it therefore counts as the second floor.

In the other system, used in the majority of European countries and some African countries, floor at ground level is called the “ground floor”, frequently having no number (or “0”); the next floor up is assigned the number 1 and is the first floor (first elevation), the first basement level gets ‘−1’, and so on. In both systems, the numbering of higher floors continues sequentially as one goes up, as shown in the following table:

Each scheme has further variations depending on how one refers to the ground floor and the subterranean levels. The existence of two incompatible conventions is a common source of confusion in international communication.

However, in all English-speaking countries, the storeys in a building are counted in the same way: a “seven-storey building” is unambiguous, although the top floor would be called “6th floor” in Britain and “7th floor” in America. This contrasts, for example, with French usage, where a 7-storey building is called une maison à 6 (six) étages. Mezzanines may or may not be counted as storeys.

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