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When telling someone which floor they have to come to do we say:

  1. Come up to the third floor.

To ask someone which floor I'm supposed to de we say:

  1. Which floor is it on?/ Which floor do I come?

I was in a hotel and my room was on the fourth floor. I wanted a top floor. Not the very top but I just wanted to ask if other floors are available. I said:

  1. Can we get a top floor room. (I'm sure it's incorrect)

Please let me know if I've said them correctly.

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  • Which floor do I come to?
    – Lambie
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 23:50

2 Answers 2

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I agree with Ronald Sole's answer, but I have something to add:

Come up to the third floor.

This is fine.

Which floor is it on?

This is fine.

Which floor do I come?

You could say which floor do I come to? or, if you're feeling pedantic or snooty, to which floor do I come? But I would more likely say which floor is it on?

I was in a hotel and my room was on the fourth floor. I wanted a top floor. Not the very top but I just wanted to ask if other floors are available. I said:

Can we get a top floor room. (I'm sure it's incorrect)

If you want a floor near the top, but not necessarily on the top, you could say can we get an upper-floor room? Alternatively, you could say could we get a room on one of the upper floors? or could we get a room on a higher floor?

(Note the use of conditional could, which is slightly more polite -- I actually didn't even notice I changed to could until I proofread that paragraph. Other formulas are of course in use, such as would it be possible to ....)

Finally, again on proofreading, I notice that your room was on the fourth floor. If you were in fact on the fourth floor, you would not say come up to the third floor but go down to the third floor.

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  • Thank you very much. Does this mean that if I want a room on the very top floor I say- "Can you get a room on the top floor." Does 'top floor' mean the very top floor of a building?
    – Ashraf
    Commented Aug 7, 2020 at 20:49
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    @Ashraf yes. Typically "top floor" means the topmost floor.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 7, 2020 at 23:16
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Come up to the third floor is fine.
So is Can we get a top floor room?
And which floor is it on?

But you need to add to to: Which floor do I come to?

It's worth bearing in mind that Brits (and some "ex-colonials") call the bottom floor of a building the ground floor while North Americans call it the first floor. In the UK, the first floor is the one above the ground floor. All the upper floors are correspondingly numbered.

And while most UK residents take a lift to the upper floors, Americans prefer the elevator.

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    "All the floors above are correspondingly numbered": it seems to me that it isn't necessarily obvious that the floor above the ground floor is the first floor.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 22:02
  • @phoog True - a point well made. Thank you. I'll add a line. Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 22:53
  • Not all floors above the first are necessarily correspondingly numbered. In North America, the 13th floor is frequently omitted (so the 14th is just above the 12th) because owners are concerned that tenants/buyers would avoid units on an "unlucky" floor. Some developers in Canadian cities have omitted floors with '4' in them (4th, 14th, 24th, etc.) out of fears that ethnically Chinese buyers might regard 4 as unlucky. Commented Aug 6, 2020 at 15:36

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