Footprint

How to spell footprint

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce footprint

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does footprint mean?

1. nounA mark or impression left on a surface by a foot or shoe.
2. nounThe amount of space something occupies, or the overall effect it has on the environment or a market.

Footprint in a sentence

• A muddy footprint on the kitchen floor showed where the dog had walked.

• The company is working to reduce its carbon footprint by switching to renewable energy.

• Police photographed a clear footprint in the soft soil beneath the window.

• The new warehouse has a smaller footprint than the old building.

Where does footprint come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'foot' to 'print'. The word 'foot' is one of the oldest pieces of the language, descending from the Old English 'fot', a common Germanic noun for the part of the leg that touches the ground. 'Print' arrived later, borrowed in the Middle Ages from the Old French 'preinte', meaning an impression or mark, which itself goes back to the Latin 'premere', 'to press'. Put together, a footprint is literally the pressed mark a foot leaves behind, a sense recorded in English from around the seventeenth century. In modern usage the word stretched figuratively to mean the ground area something occupies and then the overall impact something leaves, as in 'carbon footprint', a twentieth-century coinage. Because it is a plain compound, the only spelling care needed is keeping it a single word with the 't' and 'p' meeting in the middle.

How the word is built

• foot (the body part)
• print (a mark left by pressure)