floor
/floɹ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.94 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The interior bottom or surface of a house or building; the supporting surface of a room.
Countable
noun
The bottom surface of a natural structure, entity, or space (e.g. cave, forest, ocean, desert, etc.); the ground (surface of the Earth).
noun
A structure formed of beams, girders, etc, with proper covering, which divides a building horizontally into storeys/stories.
noun
The supporting surface or platform of a structure such as a bridge.
noun
In a parliament, the part of the house assigned to the members, as opposed to the viewing gallery.
Example Sentences
- "The room has a wooden floor."
- "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."
- "The leaves covering the forest floor provide many hiding-places for small animals."
- "Many sunken ships rest on the ocean floor."
- "The floor of a cave served the refugees as a home."
- "The pit floor showed where a ring of post holes had been."
Etymology
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /floɹ/
- British English: /flɔː/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
4-on-the-floor
back to the floor
cross the floor
dance floor
deck floor
drill floor
earth-floor
earth floor