A century ago etymologists speculated that “story” came from some lost word “stairy,” perhaps related to Gaelic staidhir, flight of stairs; or possibly from something along the lines of “stagery,” derived from “stage.” Others dismissed these as being obviously born of desperation, and for a time the experts settled on Old French estoree, a thing built. But doubts arose when researchers dug up such phrases as una historia octo fenestrarum, “a story of eight windows,” from medieval Latin history books. Historia in Roman times meant history or story, and by the Middle Ages had acquired the meaning of “picture.” So the charming notion arose that medieval folk were in the habit of installing rows of windows in their buildings called “stories” that were decorated with paintings or sculpture. The theory is that these stories, which for all anybody knows may actually have told a story, eventually came to signify a level of a building. Apparently as evidence of this practice, the authors of the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins cite the fact that they once visited a Swiss-style hotel decorated along these lines in Lake Placid, New York. (Each floor was tricked out with a large hand-lettered slogan, such as “The only way to multiply happiness is to divide it.”) At any rate, conjecture has now hardened into conviction. Believe at your own risk.

Story (British = storey)

Records from the 13th and 14th centuries indicate that the Anglo-Norman word ‘historia’ had the meaning of ‘a picture’ or ‘a tier of painted windows or of sculptures’.

By the 15th century, the English word “story” had acquired from the Anglo-Latin ‘historia’ the sense of ‘each of a number of tiers or rows of columns, windows, etc., placed horizontally above each other’. Various parish records from the 16th century tell of payments made to workmen for jobs like “making a foot of glass in the upper story of the middle aisle” or “trimming four stories of old iron.”

‘Story’ also appears in the word ‘clerestory,’ first recorded in 1412. The clerestory is the upper part of the wall of the nave of a large church that rises above adjacent rooftops and has a row of windows that admit daylight to the center of the building. “Clear” is related to the French ‘clai’ and means light.

Although the Romance languages use derivatives of Latin ‘historia’ to mean history or story, the development of the sense to ‘something that tells a story’ and then to ‘the location of something that tells a story’ is peculiar to Anglo-Latin and therefore to English.

storey

(N. Amer. also story)

• noun (pl. storeys or stories) a part of a building comprising all the rooms that are on the same level.

— ORIGIN from Latin historia ‘history’: perhaps originally referring to a tier of painted windows or sculptures on a building, representing a historical subject.

It is another case of American spelling – most English speaking countries would write it as storeys as in ‘a three storey building’ or ‘a building with three storeys’.

Nothing to do with tales and fables!!

Sometimes they call it Level. The apartment where I stayed in on Level 3.

coz many things happen on the floors .

so it could be called stories.

I’d explain but it’s a long story

subfloors