Why Are Floors Called Stories

So a tall tale a high building.

Why are floors called stories. The plural used to be storeys. In feet the average story is between 9 and 11 feet. Back in the era of kings and queens the floors of a castle were used for storage during sieges.

In other words the more floors events a story has in it the taller the building tale will be. The floors were referred to as storeys. Each floor would be used to store various different items including weapons and food.

Eventually then each floor came to be known as a story itself. Under this system the third floor officially becomes the second floor because of the two ground floors although people would generally call the upper ground level the second floor and the new second level to still be called the third floor out of convenience. In a building a story just means a floor of the building.

The story on the lowest floor was the first story. The theory is that these stories which for all anybody knows may actually have told a story eventually came to signify a level of a building. Well actually there is an architectural term called storey which means a horizontal division of a building s function or its facade.

Tthe next higher floor would be called the second story of the building and so on. A building that has seven levels or seven floors is seven stories high. There s no exact record of when storey began to be used to refer to the floor of a building but the generally held belief is that it came about in the middle ages when many buildings featured painted windows or walls which featured characters engaging in actions from one scene to another in what could be described as a narrative.

So the charming notion arose that medieval folk were in the habit of installing rows of windows in their buildings called stories that were decorated with paintings or sculpture. Buildings were sometimes called stories because of narratives painted on medieval buildings. It is believed that the term story was applied to buildings because people called these historical pictures the building s stories.