Footer

How to spell footer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce footer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does footer mean?

1. nounA block of text or information placed at the bottom of each page of a document, website, or spreadsheet.
2. nounThe widened concrete base beneath a wall or foundation that spreads the load into the ground.

Footer in a sentence

• The page number appears in the footer of every chapter.

• The builders poured the concrete footer before laying the first course of bricks.

• She added the company address to the email footer.

• A deep footer keeps the extension from settling unevenly.

Where does footer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows directly from the Old English fot, meaning the body part at the bottom of the leg, a thoroughly Germanic word with cousins across the family such as the German Fuss and the Dutch voet, all tracing back to a shared ancestor meaning 'foot'. From the literal body part, English extended 'foot' to mean the lowest part or base of almost anything, as in the foot of a hill or the foot of a page. The suffix -er was then attached to form a noun naming something that occupies or relates to that bottom position. In printing and later in word processing, a 'footer' came to mean the strip of repeated text sitting at the foot of every page, the natural partner to the 'header' at the top. The construction sense, the widened base of a wall or foundation, follows the same logic of sitting at the very bottom and bearing the load.

How the word is built

• foot (base, lowest part)
• -er (noun suffix denoting a thing that performs a role)