User:Rktect/foot

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For other uses, see Foot (disambiguation).

A foot (plural: feet , anciently fot or fod, (AKA nisu, pes, pied, pous, bd) is a part of a collection of a non-SI units of distance or length, measuring 4 palms and 16 fingers or 3 hands and 15 fingers or 12 thumbs or inches and varying in length from a Roman pes of 296 mm through an Egyptian palm based bd or 300 mm and a Mesopotamian nisu of 300 mm to a short Attic Greek foot of 308.4 mm, a median Athenian Greek foot of 316 mm and a long Greek foot of 18 fingers or 16 thumbs measuring 346.96 mm.

In a modern English foot there are twelve inches in one foot and three feet in one yard. Closely related to and sometimes mistaken for the foot are the remen of 15 inches which is the diagonal of a triangle formed with one side a quarter of 9", and another side a foot of 12" and the aln, elle or ni bw of 2 feet.

The standardization of weights and measures has left several different standard foot measures. The most commonly used feet today are based on historical feet that go back to the chalcolithic.

As recently as 1959 there were three different statute feet derived from a decree of Queen Elizabeth in 1593 to include a UK foot a US foot and a survey foot.

The imperial foot, was defined in the United Kingdom which no longer uses it. The United Statescontinues to use an Imperial foot which is defined to be exactly 0.3048 metre. This unit is sometimes denoted with a prime (e.g. 30′ means 30 feet), often approximated by an apostrophe. Similarly, inches can be denoted by a double prime (often approximated by a quotation mark), so 6′ 2″ means 6 feet 2 inches.

In addition to the current standard imperial foot, there is also a slightly different U.S. survey foot, used only in connection with surveys by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, it is defined as exactly 1200/3937 m (about 0.0002% greater than 0.3048 m).[1]

One problem for surveyors is that people have been defining property with metes and bounds measured in feet for 6000 years over which period of time changes in the definitions have resulted in a field survey no longer matching whats on the deed.

The foot as a measure was used in almost all cultures. The first known standard foot measure was from Sumeria, where a definition is given in a statue of Gudea of Lagash from around 2575 BC. The imperial foot was adapted from an Egyptian measure by the Greeks, with a subsequent larger foot being adopted by the Romans.

[edit] Legends of the foot

The popular belief is that original standard was the length of a man's foot. The English foot was originally a Roman pes. Germanic and Scandinavian feet were generally based on a Greek pous but often used an elle of two feet as the standard rather than the foot. The foot was redefined in Britain before the Norman Conquest by Athelstane, after the Norman conquest, by William In the Magna Carta by King Henry, By King Henry the Eighth, By Elizabeth I in the form of the statute foot which was again redefined in 1828, 1898, 1959, and several times more recently as in the UK it is now tied in to the definition of the meter.

The original Magna Carter measurement was from King Henry I, who stamped his foot into the mud and decreed that to be the standard. Apparently he had a foot 12 inches long and wished to standardise the unit of measurement in England.

The length of the average foot for current Europeans is about 9.4 inches (240 mm). Approximately 996 out of 1000 British men have a foot that is less than 12 inches long. A plausible explanation for the missing inches is that the measure did not refer to a naked foot, but to the length of footwear. This is consistent with the measure being convenient for practical purposes such as on building sites etc. People almost always pace out lengths whilst wearing shoes or boots, rather than removing them and pacing barefoot.

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