stor[e]y

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 14, 2010, at 5:01 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:

> Reading a novel by one of my favorite crime novelists--Michael
> Connelly, _Nine Dragons_ (NY: Little, Brown, 2009)--I find a
> description of a Hong Kong apartment building that "rose seventy-
> three stories from the midslope of the mountain" (192).
>
> But I learned as a child that the library is the tallest building in
> town; it has the most stories . . . .

both NOAD2 and AHD4 have "storey" as a chiefly British variant of
"story" 'floor of a building', and the OED has the sense under
"story", with British cites for that spelling (as well as for the
"storey" spelling).  that is: "story" is the general U.S. spelling,
and a reasonably common British spelling as well.  (GMAU -- Garner's
Modern American English -- maintains flatly that "story" is AmE and
"storey" is BrE, period, as if there were no allowable variation in
the matter on either side of the Atlantic.)

no doubt that there are some people who are fanatic about a sense
differentiation by spelling, so that they label "story" in the
building sense as simply "incorrect".  but sources like Brians and
MWDEU lend no support  to this idea; neither discusses the variant
spellings at all.

arnold

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