Storey

A storey (British English) or story (American English) is any level part of a building that could be used by people (for living, work, storage, recreation, etc.). The plurals are storeys and stories, respectively.

The terms floor, level, or deck can also be used in this sense; except that one may use "ground floor" and "ground level" for the floor closer to what is considered the ground or street level, whereas "storey" is commonly used only for levels strictly above or below that level. The words "storey" and "floor" also generally exclude levels of the building that have no roof, even if they are used by people—such as the terrace on the top roof of many buildings.

Houses commonly have only a few floors, often only one. 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. The tallest skyscraper in the world, Burj Khalifa, has 163 floors. The tallest planned skyscraper, Sky City, has 220 floors.

The height of each storey is based on the ceiling height of the rooms plus the thickness of the floors between each pain. Generally this is around 10 feet or 3 metres 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 more spacious, for example. Higher levels may be smaller in area than the ones beneath (a prominent feature of 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 is usually above the ground level, and may be called the piano nobile ("noble floor").

The attic or loft is a storey just below the building's roof; its ceiling is often pitched and/or at a different height than 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 offset from each other by less than the height of a full storey. A mezzanine, in particular, is typically a floor halfway between the ground floor and the next higher floor. Homes with a split-level entry have the entire main floor raised half a story height above the street entrance level, and a basement that is half a storey below this level. In Macy's Herald Square, there is a "one and a half" floor between the first and second, this can be considered a split level floor.

There are also multi-storey car parks, also known as parking garages.