Downstairs means on or to a lower floor of a building. If your bedroom is on the second floor and the kitchen is on the first floor, you go downstairs to get breakfast. The opposite is upstairs, which means toward a higher floor.

The word describes both a direction of movement and a location. You might say “I'm going downstairs” when you're heading down, or “The TV is downstairs” to describe where something is located. In some houses, people refer to the main floor simply as downstairs, especially when bedrooms are on upper levels.

Downstairs can also work as an adjective: “the downstairs bathroom” or “our downstairs neighbors” (people who live in the apartment below yours).

In older homes and mansions, servants often lived and worked in the downstairs areas while the family occupied the upstairs rooms. This created a social division that you might notice in historical books or movies, where “upstairs” meant wealthy and “downstairs” meant working-class. Today, most houses use floors more equally, though people still might keep guest rooms or offices downstairs while bedrooms stay upstairs.