Foot Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
99 free Foot trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Feet carry you a hundred thousand miles in a lifetime and hardly anyone knows a thing about them, which is what makes foot trivia so much fun. This quiz starts with the anatomy — how many bones and joints a foot has, which is the biggest, why the big toe is odd one out — then moves through the things that go wrong (bunions, plantar fasciitis, athlete's foot, flat feet) and the people who fix them, including the podiatrist Abraham Lincoln used as a secret Civil War envoy. It also takes the word wherever it goes: the 12-inch foot and why the US survey foot was retired, the 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli footprints, Bigfoot's carved wooden feet, Chinese foot binding, the Ethiopian who won an Olympic marathon barefoot, Cinderella's slipper, toe wrestling in Derbyshire and the oldest shoes ever found. Easy questions ask how many toes a foot has and what athlete's foot actually is; expert ones ask which anatomist named the Achilles tendon and what unit UK shoe sizes are still built on. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the foot, toes, the foot as a unit, foot conditions, footwear and the people and events involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many bones are there in a human foot?
26
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.
Q 02Which bone, the largest in the foot, forms the heel?
The calcaneus
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.
Q 03What name do the bones of the toes share with the bones of the fingers?
Phalanges
Phalanges, from the phalanx, the ancient battle line: anatomists saw the rows of finger and toe bones fitting together like infantry in close order.
Q 04Which condition crippled soldiers standing in waterlogged boots?
Trench foot
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.
Q 05A second toe that is longer than the big toe is nicknamed what?
Greek foot
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.
Q 06Having more than five toes on a foot is known medically as what?
Polydactyly
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.
Q 07The Achilles tendon, the thickest in the body, joins which muscles to the heel bone?
The calf muscles
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.
Q 08Which river was the baby Achilles dipped in, leaving only his heel unprotected?
The Styx
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.
Q 09A bunion is a deformity of the joint at the base of which digit?
The hallux
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.
Q 10Bunions in 14th- and 15th-century English skeletons coincided with a fashion for what?
Pointy shoes
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.
Q 11Plantar fasciitis causes heel pain that is typically at its worst when?
With the first steps of the day
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.
Q 12Athlete's foot is an infection caused by what kind of organism?
A fungus
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.
Q 13Athlete's foot usually first takes hold where on the foot?
Between the toes
Q 21Outside the English-speaking world, the foot survives mainly as a unit for what?
Aircraft altitude
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.
Q 22British and US shoe sizes are based on which old English unit, a third of an inch?
The barleycorn
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.
Q 23Which bird's males balance a single egg on top of their feet through the Antarctic winter?
The emperor penguin
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.
Q 14A child's 'flexible' flat foot shows no arch when standing, but it reappears when the child does what?
Stands on tiptoe
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.
Q 15Abraham Lincoln sent which of these men on confidential missions to Confederate leaders?
His podiatrist
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.
Q 16Which brand was started by a young Chicago shoe-store salesman who invented an arch support?
Dr. Scholl's
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.
Q 17Which therapy rests on the claim that points on the soles of the feet map onto the body's organs?
Reflexology
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.
Q 18Since a 1959 international agreement, one foot has been exactly 30.48 of which unit?
Centimetres
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.
Q 19Which slightly longer variant of the foot did US standards bodies deprecate in 2022?
The survey foot
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.
Q 20A bare footprint helps forensic scientists estimate what, since a foot is typically about 15% of it?
Height
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.
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.
Q 24In 1938 Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, toured for which kind of business, which gave him free products?
A shoe maker
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.
Q 25The oldest footwear yet found, about 10,000 years old and from an Oregon cave, is what kind of shoe?
Sandals
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.
Q 26The Greek poet Hesiod advised lining winter boots with 'piloi', an early kind of sock made from what?
Matted animal hair
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.
Q 27The Laetoli footprints, pressed into volcanic ash over three million years ago near Olduvai Gorge, are in which country?
Tanzania
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.
Q 28The fossil tracks at Laetoli were first spotted in 1976 when Andrew Hill fell while dodging what?
A thrown ball of elephant dung
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.
Q 29The giant tracks that gave Bigfoot its name were found by a bulldozer operator in which US state in 1958?
California
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.
Q 30What did Ray Wallace's family reveal after his death in 2002 to explain the 1958 Bigfoot tracks?
Carved wooden feet
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.