Storey

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 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, 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 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.