Storey

How to spell storey

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce storey

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does storey mean?

1. nounA single horizontal level or floor of a building.

Storey in a sentence

• The office occupies the top storey of the tower.

• Their flat is on the third storey, above the bakery.

Where does storey come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word shares an ancestor with the everyday word 'story' (a narrative), and the connection is genuinely surprising. Both descend from the Latin historia, meaning 'an account' or 'a narrative of events', which itself came from the Greek historia, 'an inquiry' or 'knowledge gained by investigation'. In Medieval Latin, historia took on an additional architectural sense: a row of windows or sculptures along the front of a building was thought to depict historical or biblical scenes, so a 'historia' became a horizontal tier of such pictures, and then simply a horizontal level of a building. English borrowed this building sense in the 1300s. British and Canadian usage later settled on the spelling 'storey' for the building level, keeping it visually distinct from 'story' the tale, which is exactly the spelling trap to remember.

How the word is built

• storey (a horizontal level of a building); from Medieval Latin historia, a tier of decorated windows on a building

British and American spelling

Storey is the British spelling. American English spells it story.