foot
foot Lexical Profile
foot Game Scores & Validity
• noun
The lower extremity of the leg below the ankle, on which a person or vertebrate animal stands and walks.
"After hiking for six hours, her left foot was sore and blistered."
A unit of linear measure in the imperial and US customary systems equal to 12 inches or 0.3048 meters.
"The ceiling in the historic library is nearly twenty feet high."
The lowest part, bottom, or base of an object, structure, or geographical feature, or the end opposite the head of a bed, grave, or table.
"A small stone cottage sits quietly at the foot of the mountain."
The basic repeating rhythmic unit of meter in verse, consisting of a specific combination of stressed and unstressed syllables.
"In prosody, an iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed immediately by a stressed syllable."
• verb
To pay or settle the cost of something, especially a substantial bill or expense.
"The municipal government agreed to foot the bill for the bridge repairs."
To walk, dance, or tread over a surface by foot.
"When the last bus failed to arrive, we had to foot it all the way back to the hostel."
To add up a column of numbers in accounting and verify the total at the bottom.
"The auditor took an extra hour to foot the ledger columns before signing off on the balance sheet."
Word Nuance & Usage
When referring to the unit of measurement, the standard plural is 'feet' (e.g., 'ten feet tall'), though the invariant form 'foot' is frequently used in informal speech or before a noun (e.g., 'a ten-foot pole').
• Rhymes for foot
Word Origin & Etymology
From Old English 'fot', derived from Proto-Germanic '*fotuz' and ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root '*ped-', making it a linguistic cognate of the Latin 'pes' (as in 'pedal' and 'pedestrian') and the Ancient Greek 'pous' (as in 'octopus' and 'tripod').