Other forms: floors
The floor is the surface you stand on inside a room. A wooden floor, sweep the floor, on the floor.
It also means a storey of a building: the third floor, top floor. In Britain the ground floor is at street level and the first floor is above it; in America the first floor is at street level, which causes real confusion in lifts. In a debate, the floor is the right to speak: take the floor, over to you. Note floorboard, dance floor, shop floor; and the floor of a market, meaning the lowest price allowed.
1nounfloorThe surface you stand on inside a room.~20%
“The baby sat on the kitchen floor, playing with pots and pans.”
2nounstoreyA storey of a building.~80%
“The office is on the third floor and the lift stops at the second.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
floor is a lower surface or storey.
Old English flor is Germanic and comes from a root meaning flat — the same root as Latin planus and English plain. A floor is named for being level, which is more than can be said for most old ones.
Proto-Indo-European
*pleh₂-
Middle English
flor
English, today
floor
From Middle English flor. Middle English floor, floour, flor, flore, flour, flur, vlor, from Old English flōr (“floor, pavement; deck; gangplank”), from Proto-West Germanic flōr, from Proto-Germanic flōraz (“ground; floor”), from Proto-Indo-European pleh₂ros (“floor”), from Proto-Indo-European pleh₂- (“flat”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA