NYT Dictionary

FLOOR

/floɹ/
NounVerbFLOHRGrade 4

Accepted in official NYT Spelling Bee puzzle years: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026

Meaning

The interior bottom or surface of a house or building; the supporting surface of a room.

Etymology

Origin: Old English

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.

Synonyms & Antonyms

Synonyms

possessionfloorflooringgroundflightlevelstoreystorybaseaddle

Antonyms

NYT Puzzle Appearances

Accepted in 12 recorded puzzles:

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