99 Fun Facts About Foot

How many bones are there in a human foot?

26. That gives a pair of feet 52 bones, about a quarter of all the bones in the body, held together by 33 joints in each foot.

Which bone, the largest in the foot, forms the heel?

The calcaneus takes the body's full weight in a fall, and a break there was nicknamed the lover's fracture, after suitors leaping from balconies to avoid being caught.

What name do the bones of the toes share with the bones of the fingers?

Phalanges, from the phalanx, the ancient battle line: anatomists saw the rows of finger and toe bones fitting together like infantry in close order.

Which condition crippled soldiers standing in waterlogged boots?

Trench foot got its name in the trenches of the First World War. Armies cut the toll with whale oil rubbed into the skin and by pairing soldiers off, each responsible for inspecting the other's feet.

A second toe that is longer than the big toe is nicknamed what?

Greek foot. Doctors call it Morton's toe, after the American surgeon who in 1927 named it metatarsus atavicus, taking it for a throwback to our ancestors' grasping feet.

Having more than five toes on a foot is known medically as what?

Polydactyly also runs in cats: about half the cats at Ernest Hemingway's old Key West house have extra toes, which is why six-toed cats are nicknamed Hemingway cats.

The Achilles tendon, the thickest in the body, joins which muscles to the heel bone?

The calf muscles pull on the heel through it with every step. When the tendon snaps, people often hear a pop and feel as if they have been kicked in the back of the leg.

Which river was the baby Achilles dipped in, leaving only his heel unprotected?

The Styx, in the best-known telling: his mother Thetis held him by the heel, so the water never touched it, and the arrow of Paris later struck him there.

A bunion is a deformity of the joint at the base of which digit?

The hallux is the big toe, hence the medical name hallux valgus. The bump is mostly not new growth: it is the end of the long bone behind the toe, pushed outward as the toe leans in.

Bunions in 14th- and 15th-century English skeletons coincided with a fashion for what?

Pointy shoes called poulaines swept England in the 14th century. Cambridge skeletons from then on show far more bunions, and more bones broken in falls among the older sufferers.

Plantar fasciitis causes heel pain that is typically at its worst when?

With the first steps of the day, or on standing up after a long sit. The odd part is that it eases with use: a few minutes of walking usually dulls the pain, and rest brings it back.

Athlete's foot is an infection caused by what kind of organism?

A fungus, from the same group that causes jock itch and ringworm, which despite its name involves no worm at all. It thrives in warm, damp places such as sweaty socks and shoes.

Athlete's foot usually first takes hold where on the foot?

Between the toes, most often the last two, where shoes keep the skin damp and airless. From there the infection can travel on hands or towels and turn up elsewhere as jock itch.

A child's 'flexible' flat foot shows no arch when standing, but it reappears when the child does what?

Stands on tiptoe. The arch is there all along but sags under the child's weight, which is why doctors usually leave painless flat feet alone.

Abraham Lincoln sent which of these men on confidential missions to Confederate leaders?

His podiatrist, Isachar Zacharie, treated Lincoln's feet and became a confidant. In 1863 Lincoln gave him a pass to Richmond, where he met the Confederacy's Judah Benjamin to sound out peace.

Which brand was started by a young Chicago shoe-store salesman who invented an arch support?

Dr. Scholl's. William Scholl carried the skeleton of a human foot in his pocket and would plonk it on a shop counter to get the manager's attention before pitching his Foot-Eazer.

Which therapy rests on the claim that points on the soles of the feet map onto the body's organs?

Reflexology reached America in 1913 as 'zone therapy', and the man who introduced it was not a foot specialist but an ear, nose and throat doctor, William Fitzgerald.

Since a 1959 international agreement, one foot has been exactly 30.48 of which unit?

Centimetres. The 1959 deal fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 metres, so the foot, the unit of people who never went metric, has been officially defined by the metric system ever since.

Which slightly longer variant of the foot did US standards bodies deprecate in 2022?

The survey foot was kept as a temporary exception for surveyors when the foot was redefined in 1959, then lingered for 63 years. Running two almost identical feet side by side caused confusion and errors.

A bare footprint helps forensic scientists estimate what, since a foot is typically about 15% of it?

Height. Foot length rises and falls with stature closely enough that a footprint at a crime scene, or a foot found in a shoe after a disaster, yields a working estimate.

Outside the English-speaking world, the foot survives mainly as a unit for what?

Aircraft altitude: airliners almost everywhere cruise at flight levels counted in hundreds of feet. Aviation's own rule book calls the foot a temporary stand-in for metric units, yet no end date has ever been set.

British and US shoe sizes are based on which old English unit, a third of an inch?

The barleycorn. Three grains of barley laid end to end defined the medieval English inch, so each full shoe size is one grain longer than the last, about 8.5 mm.

Which bird's males balance a single egg on top of their feet through the Antarctic winter?

The emperor penguin father tucks the egg under a fold of skin for about two months and eats nothing the whole time, living off his fat while the mother feeds at sea.

In 1938 Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, toured for which kind of business, which gave him free products?

A shoe maker: the International Shoe Company made his size 37 shoes for free in return. Two years later a badly fitted leg brace rubbed a blister that turned septic, and he died at 22.

The oldest footwear yet found, about 10,000 years old and from an Oregon cave, is what kind of shoe?

Sandals, woven from sagebrush bark. Some lay beneath ash from the eruption that created Crater Lake, the first clue to their age, and radiocarbon dating later put them at over 9,000 years old.

The Greek poet Hesiod advised lining winter boots with 'piloi', an early kind of sock made from what?

Matted animal hair, which is to say felt. Hesiod was telling farmers how to get through the frosts: lace on boots of ox-hide and line them thickly.

The Laetoli footprints, pressed into volcanic ash over three million years ago near Olduvai Gorge, are in which country?

Tanzania. Mary Leakey's team found animal tracks there in 1976 and the human-like trail two years later: proof that our small-brained ancestors already walked upright.

The fossil tracks at Laetoli were first spotted in 1976 when Andrew Hill fell while dodging what?

A thrown ball of elephant dung, lobbed by a colleague on the walk back to camp. With his face inches from the rock, Hill made out antelope and rhino prints set in the hardened ash.

The giant tracks that gave Bigfoot its name were found by a bulldozer operator in which US state in 1958?

California. Jerry Crew found the 16-inch prints in Humboldt County, and the local paper's front-page story carried the nickname around the world.

What did Ray Wallace's family reveal after his death in 2002 to explain the 1958 Bigfoot tracks?

Carved wooden feet. His family said Wallace had a friend carve them, then he and his brother slipped them on and stamped out the tracks around his own work site as a prank.

In imperial China, what name was given to feet altered by binding?

Lotus feet, at their most prized the tiny 'golden lotus'. To make them, the four smaller toes were folded under the sole and bound tight toward the heel.

Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila won the marathon at which Olympics while running without shoes?

Rome 1960, where he set a world record on bare feet. Four years later in Tokyo, weeks after having his appendix removed, he won again, this time wearing shoes.

Which Beatle crosses the road barefoot on the Abbey Road album cover?

Paul McCartney. When a rumour took hold that he had died and been replaced by a lookalike, fans read the cover as a funeral procession, with the shoeless Beatle as the corpse.

In which sport did some professional kickers play with one bare foot through the 1980s?

American football. Barefoot kickers such as Tony Franklin and Rich Karlis swore that bare skin gave a truer feel for the ball, or that a shoe soaked up some of the kick, though nobody ever proved either.

Which sport did English pub regulars invent in the 1970s to give Britain a world champion, only for a Canadian to win?

Toe wrestling. Four drinkers at a Staffordshire inn wanted a game nobody else played, so that England would be sure of a title, but a visiting Canadian won in its second year and the contest was dropped.

Which animal's name comes from the Greek for 'flat-footed'?

Platypus. It was meant to be the scientific name too, but a beetle had already claimed it, so zoologists had to file the animal under Ornithorhynchus, 'bird-snout', instead.

Neil Armstrong stepped out first, but whose bootprint is the one in the famous Apollo 11 photograph?

Buzz Aldrin pressed it into the dust on purpose and photographed it himself, part of a study of how lunar soil behaves. Armstrong's first step, with his left boot, had come about an hour earlier.

Animals such as cats that walk on their toes are described by what term?

Digitigrade, literally 'toe-walking'. Standing on the toes with the heel held clear of the ground is one reason a cat can move so fast and so quietly.

The horse, rhinoceros and tapir belong to which group of hoofed mammals?

Odd-toed ungulates carry their weight on the middle toe: a horse stands on that one alone. The tapir bends the rule with four toes on each front foot, though it has three behind.

In poetry, a 'foot' is the basic repeating unit of what?

Metre. The unit is usually said to be named after a foot beating time or stepping a dance, one lift and one fall; five of them in a line make the pentameter of Shakespeare's verse.

Which author's 1697 telling gave Cinderella her glass slipper, pumpkin coach and fairy godmother?

Charles Perrault. The Grimms' later German telling has none of the three: a bird in the tree on her mother's grave throws down the dresses, and the lost slipper is gold.

Rhodopis, heroine of what is often called the earliest Cinderella story, was a courtesan living in which country?

Egypt. As Strabo tells it, an eagle snatched her sandal while she bathed and dropped it in the king's lap at Memphis; he had the country searched for its owner and married her.

Which word for a line of ancestors comes from the Old French for 'crane's foot'?

Pedigree, from pied de grue. The spreading lines that marked descent on a medieval family chart looked to scribes like the print of a crane's foot.

In 1912, 'flat-footed' was first recorded meaning 'unprepared' as slang from which sport?

Baseball, in the earliest record: a player caught flat-footed was not on his toes. Some word historians think the phrase began at the racetrack instead, with a horse and jockey not ready for the start.

The bacterium behind smelly feet also gives which famously pungent cheese its odour?

Limburger. The match is close enough to fool an insect: malaria mosquitoes, which home in on human feet, proved just as keen on the cheese, a finding that won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006.

The Roman foot's twelfth part gave English the word 'inch' and the name of which unit of weight?

Ounce. The Latin uncia meant a twelfth of anything: a twelfth of a foot became the inch and a twelfth of a pound the ounce, and the troy pound still has twelve ounces, not sixteen.

On which day of Holy Week do many churches re-enact Jesus washing his disciples' feet?

Maundy Thursday. English kings and queens once washed the feet of the poor that day too; the custom shrank to a gift of specially minted coins, the Maundy money the monarch still hands out.

The cuboid, navicular and cuneiform bones sit with the heel and ankle bones in which group?

The tarsus. The tarsier, the huge-eyed leaping primate of South-East Asia, is named after the same bones, which in its feet are stretched extraordinarily long.

Which lizard can run up a pane of glass on toes covered in millions of microscopic hairs?

The gecko. Its toe pads use no glue, no suction and no moisture: the hairs split into tips so fine that they simply cling to the surface, and let go again with every step.

From the 1920s, many shoe shops checked the fit of new shoes with machines that bathed feet in what?

X-rays let customers peer through a porthole at their own toe bones inside the shoe. The machines lingered in some shops until the 1970s, when radiation rules finally retired them.

Which Roman emperor is known by a nickname meaning 'little boot', given by his father's soldiers?

Caligula was really named Gaius; the troops coined the nickname because his mother dressed him in a miniature uniform, complete with small army boots called caligae.

Which mythical king of Thebes has a name meaning 'swollen foot', from the ankle wounds he suffered as a baby?

Oedipus got the name after his ankles were pierced and tied together as a newborn, before he was abandoned on a mountainside in the hope of dodging a prophecy.

Before laying eggs, a female butterfly lands on a leaf and uses sensors on her feet to do what?

Taste it: contact sensors on a butterfly's feet tell her whether the plant is one her caterpillars will be able to eat, so she checks before a single egg is laid.

High heels began as riding gear for which empire's cavalry, to keep their feet in the stirrups?

Persian horsemen wore heeled boots called galesh from about the 10th century, and the heel also steadied archers who stood up on a galloping horse to shoot.

The 10,000-steps-a-day goal began as the name of a 1960s pedometer made by a clock company in which country?

Japan's Yamasa company built the manpo-kei, or 'ten-thousand step-meter', after a Tokyo doctor urged everyone to walk more around the time of the 1964 Olympics.

Most birds have four toes, but which bird is the only one with just two toes on each foot?

Ostrich feet are built for sprinting: losing toes appears to help the bird outrun predators, and the nail on its larger toe looks a lot like a hoof.

The two small bones buried in a tendon under the big toe joint take their name from which seed?

Sesame gives the sesamoid bones their name, a nod to how small most of them are. The largest bone of this tendon-dwelling kind is the kneecap.

Which ankle bone carries the body's whole weight from the shin to the foot, yet has no muscles attached?

Talus bones from hoofed animals were the original dice, which is why dice are still nicknamed 'bones'. In people the bone simply sits wherever its neighbours hold it.

Most ankle sprains happen when the foot rolls in which direction, straining the ligaments on the outer side?

Inwards is the usual roll, with body weight twisting the foot past its normal range. A sprained ankle is the most commonly occurring injury in sport.

The main ankle joint, which lets the foot point up and down, is which type of joint, like the elbow?

Hinge joints swing in one plane, like a door. Much of the foot's other positioning comes from a second joint just beneath, which some anatomists call the lower ankle joint.

The bony bump on the outer side of the ankle is the lower end of which slender leg bone?

Fibula is the smaller of the two lower-leg bones and, for its length, the most slender of all the long bones. The matching bump on the inner ankle belongs to the shin bone.

British law protects which older job title alongside the modern name for exactly the same foot specialist?

Chiropodist is the older title, and it hides a clue to the job's past: 'chiro' means hand, because early practitioners treated hands as well as feet.

Which painful joint disease, nicknamed the disease of kings, strikes the base of the big toe in about half of cases?

Gout earned its royal nickname from its link with rich food and obesity, and doctors have a special word, podagra, for an attack in the big toe.

Verrucas, the warts that grow on the soles and spread via communal shower floors, are caused by which virus?

Human papillomavirus is the culprit, but in different strains from the ones the HPV vaccine targets, so the jab gives no protection against verrucas.

People with which long-term condition are taught to inspect their feet often, as nerve damage can dull pain there?

Diabetes can leave a cut or blister unfelt until it becomes an ulcer. Foot infection is the most common reason people with the condition lose a limb without an accident.

The Ponseti method, a series of gentle stretches and plaster casts for babies, corrects which condition?

Clubfoot leaves a newborn's foot twisted in and down. Ignacio Ponseti devised his cast treatment in Iowa in the 1950s, sparing babies invasive surgery.

A 'march fracture', a stress injury named after army recruits on long marches, affects which bones?

Metatarsals, the five long bones between the ankle bones and the toes, crack under repeated pounding rather than one blow. The second and third are hit most, because they stay fixed while walking.

Snails and slugs belong to which animal group, whose name is built from ancient words for 'stomach' and 'foot'?

Gastropods crawl on a single muscular 'foot' that sits on the underside of the body, just below the guts, and that position is what the name describes.

Which mainly British name for Australia and New Zealand comes from an ancient word meaning 'with feet opposite'?

Antipodes first meant the people living on the far side of the globe, whose feet point at ours. The name then stuck to the lands roughly opposite Britain.

Which martial art has a name that combines words for striking with the foot, striking with the hand and 'the way'?

Taekwondo joins tae, to strike with the foot, kwon, to strike with the hand, and do, the way. The Korean sport lives up to the first part with its emphasis on kicking.

Which Olympian god flew on the talaria, winged footwear with the wings fixed at the ankles?

Hermes, messenger of the gods, already wears golden footwear in Homer, but the wings are first described in a later poem, the Shield of Heracles.

The phrase 'feet of clay' comes from a king's dream of a towering statue in which book of the Bible?

Daniel interprets the dream for King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon: a stone strikes the glorious statue and it is smashed to pieces like chaff on a threshing floor.

The five positions of the feet, credited in 1725 to the choreographer Pierre Beauchamp, are the basis of which art form?

Ballet's five positions all turn the feet outwards. Serge Lifar codified a sixth and seventh with the feet turned in during the 1930s, but they are used only in his own choreography.

Which Hollywood cinema has collected film stars' footprints in concrete in its forecourt since the 1920s?

Chinese Theatre founder Sid Grauman ordered an extremely hard concrete for the forecourt, and its blocks hold the stars' signatures and handprints as well.

Adam's Peak, whose summit rock bears a mark revered as a sacred footprint by several faiths, is in which country?

Sri Lanka's pilgrims climb to a mark that Buddhists hold to be the Buddha's footprint, that Hindus link with Shiva or Hanuman, and that some Muslims and Christians give to Adam.

Christy Brown's memoir My Left Foot, typed with the toes of the one limb he could control, is set in which city?

Dublin was home to Brown and his twenty-one siblings, and the 1989 film of the memoir won two acting Oscars.

Stiletto heels, popularised by French designers in the 1950s, borrow their name from an Italian word for which weapon?

Dagger is the meaning of the Italian original, a short, slender thrusting blade. The word was being applied to very narrow high heels by 1953.

In which classic novel does a castaway living alone on an island find a single human footprint on the shore?

Robinson Crusoe recoiling from the footprint was one of four scenes Robert Louis Stevenson called unforgettable, alongside Achilles shouting at the Trojans and Ulysses bending his great bow.

Which chess piece takes its name from a medieval Latin word for a foot soldier?

Pawn comes down from the Latin pedonem, 'one going on foot', by way of the Old French peon, which meant both an infantryman and the chess piece.

Which animals belong to the macropods, a family whose name means 'large foot' because of their long hind feet?

Kangaroos share the family with wallabies, wallaroos, pademelons and the quokka, and most of its members have very long, narrow hind feet.

Which small animal's name is also given to the rubbery triangular pad on the underside of a horse's hoof?

Frog is the name of the pad, which absorbs shock and also works like a pump, pushing blood from the hoof back up the long, thin leg towards the heart.

Which volcanic rock, light enough to float on water, is rubbed on the feet in pedicures to remove hard skin?

Pumice has been scrubbing skin for a very long time: a Roman poem shows it removing dead skin as far back as 100 BC. It is also what stone-washes jeans.

The Foot Book, a rhyming picture book of 1968, uses many different kinds of feet to teach toddlers which concept?

Opposites are the lesson, and the idea travelled: a publishing project in Laos borrowed the same pairing trick for its own book for very young readers.

Stroking the sole of a baby's foot makes the big toe rise, a reflex named after which neurologist?

Babinski gave his name to a response that is normal in infants but a warning in adults, where the same rising toe can point to disease of the brain or spinal cord.

Surgeon Robert Jones described the foot fracture named after him in 1902, having broken his own foot doing what?

Dancing did the damage, and the surgeon wrote up his own injury. A milder break close by, at the very base of the same bone on the foot's outer edge, is sometimes called a dancer's fracture.

The Lisfranc injury of the midfoot is named after a surgeon who saw it in fallen riders during which leader's wars?

Napoleon's wars gave Jacques Lisfranc his case, a soldier whose foot turned gangrenous after a fall from a horse. A foot trapped in the stirrup is the classic cause.

Fossil human footprints found in 2009 and dated to more than 21,000 years ago lie in which US national park?

White Sands in New Mexico keeps the tracks in gypsum soil alongside those of mammoths and ground sloths. If the dating holds, they may be the oldest evidence of people in the Americas.

Centipede means 'hundred feet', yet no species has exactly 100 legs, because the leg pairs always come in what?

An odd number of leg pairs is the rule, anywhere from 15 pairs to 191, so the total can never be the 50 pairs that the name promises.

Rubber-soled shoes were being called 'sneakers' in America by the 1890s because of which quality?

Their quietness earned the name: a rubber sole made no sound, and as early as 1862 a night officer's rubber shoes were being called 'sneaks'.

Until about 1800, most shoes were what the trade now calls 'straights', meaning they were made without what?

A left and right shape was missing, so each shoe went on either foot. Roman soldiers, by contrast, had been issued with distinct left and right footwear centuries earlier.

Which sliding metal instrument, patented in the 1920s to replace a wooden stick, do shoe shops use to size feet?

Brannock Device development took its inventor two years, and the result measures length, width and arch length, with a heel cup for each foot.

The Foot Book launched which picture-book series, aimed at children too young for the Beginner Books line?

Bright and Early Books started with this title, pitched at children not yet ready for Beginner Books, the imprint for ages three to nine.

Which teenager ran barefoot in the 1984 Olympic 3,000 metres, where Mary Decker fell after colliding with her?

Zola Budd mainly trained and raced without shoes. Born in South Africa and running for Britain, she led for a while after the collision, then faded to finish seventh.

Which anatomical term describes bending the ankle so that the toes are drawn up towards the shin?

Dorsiflexion is what lets a person sink into a deep squat while the heels stay flat on the ground.

Which birds climb and grip with zygodactyl feet, on which two toes face forward and two face back?

Parrots use the two-and-two grip for climbing and swinging, and the arrangement is such a good idea that it evolved separately in birds nine times.

Which towering platform shoes, some more than 50 cm high, were worn by Venetian women from about 1400 to 1700?

Chopines began as overshoes that kept dresses out of the mud, then turned into status symbols: the higher the shoe, the higher the wearer's standing.

Doctors check circulation in the leg by feeling for the dorsalis pedis pulse, which is found where?

On top of the foot is where the dorsalis pedis artery runs. Its pulse is a quick check for peripheral vascular disease, with one catch: the artery is simply absent in 2 to 3 per cent of healthy young people.

In Tolkien's Middle-earth, which people hardly ever wear shoes, thanks to leathery soles and hair-topped feet?

Hobbits stand only about three and a half feet tall on average, and the hair on their feet is usually brown, like the hair on their heads.

In the myths of the Trojan War, which prince shot the arrow that struck Achilles in his one weak spot?

Paris fired the fatal shot, possibly with a poisoned tip, and the poison matters: a wound to a tendon alone would be unlikely to kill.