floor

Reading level: medium

Estimated CEFR level: A2 — Elementary

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

  1. noun the inside lower horizontal surface (as of a room, hallway, tent, or other structure)
  2. noun a structure consisting of a room or set of rooms at a single position along a vertical scale
  3. noun a lower limit

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.

In classic literature

Synonyms

flooring

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