Definition
nounThe interior bottom or surface of a house or building; the supporting surface of a room.
nounThe bottom surface of a natural structure, entity, or space (e.g. cave, forest, ocean, desert, etc.); the ground (surface of the Earth).
Sentence Examples
Your glasses fell on the floor.
I can place the palms of my hands on the floor without bending my knees.
They're renting a furnished flat on the third floor.
Word Origin & History
Inherited from 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”).
Cognates
Cognate with Scots flair, fluir (“floor”), Saterland Frisian Floor (“floor”), Dutch vloer (“floor”), German Flur (“corridor, hall, hallway, stairwell”), Limburgish Vlǫǫr (“floor”), Low German Floor (“hallway or entrance to a house”), Luxembourgish Flouer (“countryside, farmland”); also Breton and Cornish leur (“floor, ground, surface”), Irish lár (“floor, ground”), Scottish Gaelic làr (“earth, floor, ground”), Manx laare (“bottom, deck, floor; level, storey”), Welsh llawr (“floor, ground”), Latin plānus (“even, flat, level”), Greek απαλάμη (apalámi), παλάμη (palámi, “hand, palm”), Albanian pëllëmbë (“palm”), Latgalian pluons (“thin”), Latvian plāns (“thin”), Lithuanian plonas (“fine, slender, thin”), Belarusian, Macedonian, Russian, and Ukrainian по́ле (póle, “field”), Bulgarian поле́ (polé, “field”), Czech, Polish, and Slovak pole (“field”), Serbo-Croatian по̏ље, pȍlje (“field”), Slovene polje (“field”), Hittite 𒁄𒄭𒅖 (palḫis, “broad, wide”). Related to flat.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire."
— 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], →OCLC, page 0016:
"When Timothy and Julia hurried up the staircase to the bedroom floor, where a considerable commotion was taking place, Tim took Barry Leach with him. He had him gripped firmly by the arm, since he felt it was not safe to let him loose, and he had no immediate idea what to do with him."
— 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 19, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
"Meet me on the floor tonight
Show me how to move like the water"
— 2025 April 4, Ed Sheeran, Ilya Salmanzadeh, Johnny McDaid, Savan Kotecha, “Azizam”, in Play, performed by Ed Sheeran:
"At each table stood a young, slim, poker-faced croupier serving the punters who anxiously watched the turning of the cards. The next two floors were similar though not quite as spectacular and the stakes were lower."
— 2004, Tim Hatton, Tock Tock Birds: A Spider in the Web of International Terrorism, page 284:
"The conference started as an impromptu session in the coffee shop this morning when waitresses walked off the floor rather than serve four Negro men and women delegates."
— 1947 March 18, U.S. Government Printing Office, Proceedings and Debates of the Congress, Eightieth Congress, First Session, page 2206: