50 Fun Facts About Foot

How many bones are there in a human foot?

Add 33 joints and more than a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments, and two feet hold roughly a quarter of all the bones in the body.

What is the largest bone in the foot?

The heel bone sits under the talus, the ankle bone, and is cushioned by a layer of fat.

How many phalanx bones does the big toe have, unlike the other four toes?

The other four toes have one more each, and the big toe is worked by its own dedicated muscles.

How many arches does the human foot have?

Two run lengthwise and one across; together they act as shock absorbers and make walking and running more energy-efficient.

An inherited trait in which the second toe is longer than the big toe is nicknamed what?

Also called Morton's toe, it comes from a dominant gene; the more common longer big toe is the recessive pattern.

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

Syndactyly is fused or webbed toes, and arachnodactyly describes unusually long, thin 'spider' digits.

The Achilles tendon holds what record among the tendons of the human body?

It joins the calf muscles to the heel bone, and Hippocrates knew it simply as the 'tendo magnus', the great tendon.

In which year did anatomist Philip Verheyen first record the name 'cord of Achilles'?

He was recalling the myth of Thetis dipping baby Achilles in the Styx while holding him by the heel, leaving that one spot vulnerable.

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

That is the big toe; the medical name is hallux valgus, and the little-toe version is a 'tailor's bunion' or bunionette.

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

Roughly 23% of adults have bunions, and women are affected far more often than men.

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

About 10% of people get it at some point, and heel spurs show up on X-rays in up to half of them.

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

Its medical name is tinea pedis, it was first described in 1908, and it affects about 15% of people worldwide.

Athlete's foot most commonly takes hold in the space between which two digits of the foot?

The fungi thrive around swimming pools and locker rooms, and the same species can spread to the nails and hands.

In children, the arch of the foot normally finishes developing by roughly what age?

Flat feet are common and normal in toddlers; going barefoot on varied terrain helps the arches form.

Which member of his household staff did Lincoln send on confidential missions to Confederate leaders?

Isachar Zachrie tended Lincoln's feet; Napoleon and the French kings also kept personal foot doctors.

The world's first podiatric society was founded in 1895 in which city?

It still operates as the NYSPMA; the first podiatry school opened in 1911, and Britain's society followed a year later at the London Foot Hospital.

What kind of specialist introduced reflexology to the US in 1913?

William H. Fitzgerald called it zone therapy; reviews have found no convincing evidence it helps any medical condition.

Since a 1959 international agreement, the foot has been defined as exactly how many metres?

It follows from the yard being fixed at 0.9144 m; the United States is the only industrialised country that still prefers the foot to the metre.

Which slightly longer variant of the foot, long used in land records, did US standards bodies deprecate in 2022?

It differed from the international foot by only about two parts per million.

The foot of an adult European-American man is typically about what share of his height?

That gives a 175 cm man a foot of about 268 mm; a study of nearly 1,200 North American men found an average of 26.3 cm.

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

Civilian air traffic worldwide is still controlled in flight levels measured in hundreds of feet.

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

Continental Europe uses the Paris point of two-thirds of a centimetre, and East Asia uses millimetres under the Mondopoint system.

The metal foot-measuring tool in shoe shops was patented by its inventor in which year?

Charles F. Brannock's device also gives width, with D the standard men's width and B the standard for women.

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

Wadlow stood 8 ft 11.1 in and needed leg braces to walk; the International Shoe Company footed the bill for his enormous footwear.

The oldest known footwear, sagebrush sandals found in 1938 in Fort Rock Cave, comes from which US state?

They have been dated to between 10,500 and 9,300 years old.

According to Hesiod, 8th-century BC Greeks wore socks called 'piloi' made from what?

The Romans later sewed fabric into fitted socks called udones.

The Laetoli footprints, preserved in ash 3.7 million years ago, are in which country?

Mary Leakey's team found them in 1976, and they showed that walking upright came before big brains in human ancestors.

The Laetoli footprints were spotted in 1976 when Andrew Hill fell while dodging what?

With his face inches from the rock, he recognised fossil animal tracks; the hominin trail excavated by 1978 runs about 24 metres.

The 1958 'Bigfoot' tracks found by bulldozer operator Jerry Crew in California were about how long?

In 2002 the family of his late co-worker Ray Wallace revealed the tools he had used to fake them.

What did Ray Wallace's family reveal in his basement in 2002, explaining the 1958 Bigfoot tracks?

Wallace had got the idea from Rant Mullens, who used similar wooden feet in the 1930s to scare huckleberry pickers in Washington.

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

'Lotus feet' were worn with lotus shoes; the custom may have begun among 10th-century court dancers and by the 19th century affected 40–50% of Chinese women.

In which year did the new Republic of China government ban foot binding?

Manchu emperors had tried and failed to outlaw it in the 17th century; by 2007 only a handful of women with bound feet were still alive.

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

He was Ethiopia's first Olympic champion and defended the title four years later, becoming the first to win two Olympic marathons.

Which 1960s British singer was nicknamed the shoeless 'Pop Princess' for performing without footwear?

Later barefoot regulars include Jimmy Buffett, Cape Verde's Cesária Évora and Joss Stone.

Until the 1980s, some players in which football position played without a shoe on their kicking foot?

They always kept a shoe on the non-kicking foot, and some believed bare skin gave a better feel and more torque on the ball.

Toe wrestling was invented in 1974 by British pub-goers wanting a sport Britain would dominate. Who won the next year?

The world championships are held in Derbyshire; rounds start when the referee shouts 'toes away' and feet are checked for warts first.

Toe wrestling's most decorated champion, with at least 14 world titles, is known by what nickname?

He has broken at least four toes in competition; his co-owner of the federation had his toenails surgically removed.

Neil Armstrong's first step onto the Moon on 21 July 1969 was made with which foot?

He stepped off the Lunar Module's landing pad at 02:56 UTC and the exact moment of the step remains slightly uncertain.

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

Humans and bears are plantigrade, walking on the whole sole, while horses and cattle are unguligrade, walking on hoofed toe-tips.

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

The tapir is the oddity, with three toes on each hind foot and four on each front foot, while a horse stands on a single hoof.

In poetry, what is a line of five metrical feet called?

It is the most common line length in English verse, and the iamb, trochee, dactyl and anapaest are the most common feet.

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

Basile's Italian version came earlier in 1634, and the Brothers Grimm published their Aschenputtel in 1812.

The oldest lost-slipper story is about Rhodopis, a Greek courtesan living in which country?

The geographer Strabo first recorded it; a Chinese variant, Ye Xian, was written down around 860, centuries before Perrault.

The expression 'to put one's foot in it', meaning to make a mess of something, dates from which year?

'Foot in the grave' followed in 1844, 'best foot foremost' in 1849 and 'foot in mouth' not until 1942.

By the early 1910s 'flat-footed' meant 'unprepared' in the slang of which sport?

'Footloose', meaning free to move the feet, goes back to the 1690s and gained its 'free to act' sense in 1873.

How much sweat can a single human foot produce in a day, according to the Wikipedia article on socks?

Foot odour comes from bacteria feeding on that sweat inside shoes, and it is a diagnostic sign of the rare condition isovaleric acidemia.

The standard Roman foot, the pes, measured roughly how long?

A longer 'pes Drusianus' of about 334 mm was used in some provinces; Rome, Greece and China all measured with the foot rather than the cubit.

The earliest archaeological evidence of foot binding is Huang Sheng's tomb. She died aged 17 in which year?

Her feet and those of Madame Zhou, who died three decades later, were bound with gauze strips 1.8 metres long.

The cuboid, navicular and cuneiform bones of the midfoot belong to which region?

The tarsus has seven bones in all, the metatarsus five and the toes fourteen phalanges, giving the famous total of 26.

Nico Surings set a 2006 record by running 100 metres barefoot on what surface?

Todd Ragsdale logged 102 miles without shoes on a school track in 2010, pending Guinness confirmation.