floor
UK /flɔː/ · US /floɹ/ noun, verb
- noun (countable) The interior bottom or surface of a house or building; the supporting surface of a room. “The room has a wooden floor.”
- noun (geology, biology, chiefly with a modifier) The bottom surface of a natural structure, entity, or space (e.g. cave, forest, ocean, desert, etc.); the ground (surface of the Earth). “The leaves covering the forest floor provide many hiding-places for small animals.”
- noun (UK, dialectal, colloquial) The ground. “After stepping off the bus, my wallet fell on the floor.”
- noun (construction, architecture) 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. “Wooden planks of the old bridge's floor were nearly rotten.”
- noun (architecture, countable) A storey/story of a building. “For years we lived on the third floor.”
- noun In a parliament, the part of the house assigned to the members, as opposed to the viewing gallery.
- noun (by extension) The right to speak at a given time during a debate or other public event. “Will the senator from Arizona yield the floor?”
- verb (transitive) To cover or furnish with a floor. “floor a house with pine boards”
- verb To strike down or lay level with the floor; to knock down.
- verb (informal, dated) To hang (a picture on exhibition) near the base of a wall, where it cannot easily be seen.
- verb (driving, transitive, slang) To push (a pedal) down to the floor, especially to accelerate. “our driver floored the pedal”
- verb (informal, transitive) To silence by a conclusive answer or retort. “floor an opponent”
- verb (informal, transitive, usually passive voice) To amaze or greatly surprise. “We were floored by his confession.”
- verb (colloquial, transitive) To finish or make an end of. “floor a college examination”
- verb (mathematics) To set a lower bound. “floored division”
Synonyms
possession flooring ground flight level storey story base trading floor shock ball over blow out of the water take aback deck coldcock dump knock down
Antonyms
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”).
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.
Webster’s 1913
- noun The bottom or lower part of any room; the part upon which we stand and upon which the movables in the room are supported.
- noun The structure formed of beams, girders, etc., with proper covering, which divides a building horizontally into stories. Floor in sense 1 is, then, the upper surface of floor in sense 2.
- verb To cover with a floor; to furnish with a floor; as, to floor a house with pine boards.
- verb To strike down or lay level with the floor; to knock down; hence, to silence by a conclusive answer or retort; as, to floor an opponent.
Etymology [AS. fl; akin to D. vloer, G. flur field, floor, entrance hall, Icel. fl floor of a cow stall, cf. Ir. & Gael. lar floor, ground, earth, W. llawr, perh. akin to L. planus level. Cf. Plain smooth.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “floor”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details