Footed

How to spell footed

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce footed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does footed mean?

1. verbPast tense of 'foot': paid or settled the whole cost of something.
2. adjectiveHaving feet, or feet of a specified type or number.

Footed in a sentence

• verb

  Her grandfather footed the entire bill for the wedding reception.

• adjective

  The table was a heavy, claw-footed piece of antique furniture.

• verb

  The company footed the travel costs for every delegate at the conference.

• adjective

  A sure-footed goat picked its way along the narrow mountain ledge.

Where does footed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the inflected form of the verb and noun 'foot', which descends from the Old English 'fot', meaning the part of the leg below the ankle on which a person or animal stands. That word goes all the way back to a shared Germanic ancestor, and beyond it to an Indo-European root that also produced the Latin 'pes, pedis' and the Greek 'pous, podos', which is why so many distant relatives like 'pedal', 'pedestrian', and 'podium' carry the same idea of the foot. The plural 'feet' preserves an old sound change, while the verb developed practical senses such as walking on foot and, by extension, paying or totalling something up (as in adding a column of figures at the foot of a page). When you add the regular '-ed' ending you simply double nothing and write 'footed', the spelling trap being only that single 't' before the suffix rather than a doubled one.

How the word is built

• foot (Old English fot: the lower limb's end)
• -ed (past-tense / adjectival suffix)