foot
/fʊt
/- Loop one end of the tubing around the ball of the foot with the injured ankle.
- This slows blood circulation and causes even more fluid to build up in your feet and ankles.
Synonyms
- They have an opposable hallux on their hind feet, and their pelage is soft, thick, and wooly.
- The animal takes off with a push from its large and muscular hind limbs and lands on its hind feet and tail.
Synonyms
- Simply knit around and around until the foot of the sock reaches two inches.
- Turn right side out and slide the shoe onto the foot of the stocking.
- However, he is armed with two things which are valued higher than anything else these days, speed of foot and a refusal to lose.
- In his position, Bergkamp has never really felt the necessity for speed of foot.
- He had never been strong, but his Nymphian heritage had blessed him with speed, as he was light and fleet of foot.
- He laughed richly and grinned at her, making the crow's feet at the edge of his eyes ever more present.
- A small ball of clay or soil, pressed around the foot of the chair, bewildered us.
- When threading up any sewing machine make sure the foot is 'up' as this opens the tension disks and the thread goes between.
- This is especially common in larger spider veins around the feet and ankles.
- This uncommon lesion occurs predominantly in the small bones of the hands and feet, not the ankle.
- Tomorrow, the team will be dropped by helicopter into the jungle and must trek to their base at the foot of a volcano.
- He came on with Jessica St Rose aka Pepper Sauce, as her small but vibrant fan base rushed to the foot of the stage.
- The dive base lay at the foot of a steep boulder slope, overhung by a high, arched ceiling adorned with enormous stalactites.
Synonyms
- Linda sits at the foot of the dinner table and we give her scraps.
- Two elegant chair arms add comfort and make this chair ideal for the head or foot of the dining table.
- I set the stone at the foot of her grave and stared at it in silence for awhile, remembering her face, voice, and actions.
- Quartz stopped at the foot of his grave, tears flowing down her cheeks.
- With the sail laying down, rake sail back until the foot of the sail is touching the tail of the board.
- Takeshi stood a good six feet tall for a young man of 16.
- He stood six feet tall and was covered in coarse black fur.
- The center was a large room a good five hundred feet in diameter and several stories high.
- Normally it would consist of two eight foot stops and a four foot stop.
- The largest harpsichord in the collection is described as possessing five registers and four sets of strings, one of which was probably a sixteen-foot stop.
- The division of a line of poetry into feet is much like the division of a musical phrase into bars.
- But she genuinely excels on those occasions when she employs a mixture of metrical feet.
- But we didn't have time to worry about that, so we got changed in the hotel's swimming pool changing rooms (!) and hot footed it to the wedding.
- ‘Yeah, let's go find a takeaway,’ agreed Ron, as they hot footed it outside.
- I carried on to the client's home and then hot footed it back home to get David.
- But isn't the public, which currently foots the bill for one third of RTE's total revenue, entitled to know exactly where their money is going?
- But, regardless of the squabbling, who foots the bill?
Synonyms
Phrases
at someone's feet
be rushed (or run) off one's feet
feet of clay
get one's feet under the table
get one's feet wet
get (or start) off on the right (or wrong) foot
have something at one's feet
have (or keep) one's (or both) feet on the ground
have a foot in both camps
have (or get) a foot in the door
have one foot in the grave
my foot!
off one's feet
on one's feet
on (or by) foot
on the back foot
on foot of
on the front foot
put one's best foot forward
put one's feet up
put foot
put one's foot down
put one's foot in it (or put one's foot in one's mouth)
put a foot wrong
set foot on (or in)
set something on foot
sweep someone off their feet
think on one's feet
to one's feet
under one's feet
under foot
Derivatives
footless
- Are they going to breed a headless footless model?
- The client has wheeled himself uncomfortably close to me, his footless leg dressed in a brightly colored argyle sock.
- Today I was wearing a pair of black opaque footless tights.
Origin
Old English fōt, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch voet and German Fuss, from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit pad, pāda, Greek pous, pod-, and Latin pes, ped- 'foot'.
An Old English word that appears as far back as the epic poem Beowulf, probably written in the 700s, foot comes from an ancient root which also gives us Greek pous, the root of words as varied as antipodes, octopus, and podium (mid 18th century), and Latin pes ‘foot’ (see pawn). The measure equal to 12 inches was originally based on the length of a man's foot.
When we use feet of clay to suggest that a respected person has a fundamental flaw, we are reaching back to a story from biblical times. In the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, dreamed about a magnificent idol which had feet ‘part of iron and part of clay’, and which was broken into pieces. The prophet Daniel interpreted this to mean that the kingdom would eventually fall. To have one foot in the grave is to be near death. Although the idea dates back to the 17th century, it is now particularly associated with the 1990s British TV comedy One Foot in the Grave, starring Richard Wilson as the unlucky but defiant Victor Meldrew, who had been forced into early retirement. See also first