Feet

A foot (plural: feet; symbol or abbreviation: ft or, sometimes, ′ - a prime) is a unit of length, in a number of different systems, including English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. more...

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Its size can vary from system to system, but in each is around a quarter to a third of a meter. The most commonly used foot today is the international foot. There are 3 feet in a yard and 12 inches in a foot.

Definition

International foot

In 1958 the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations defined the length of the international yard to be 0.9144 metres. Consequently, the international foot is defined to be equal to 0.3048 metres (equivalent to 30.48 centimetres).

The international standard symbol for a foot is \"ft\" (see ISO 31-1, Annex A). In some cases, the foot is denoted by a prime, which is often approximated by an apostrophe, and the inch by a double prime. For example, 6 feet 2 inches is denoted by 6′2″. This use can cause confusion, because the prime and double prime are also international standard symbols for arcminutes and arcseconds.

Historical origin

The foot as a measure was used in almost all cultures and was usually divided into 12, sometimes 10 inches / thumbs or into 16 fingers / digits. 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. Some metrologists speculate that the imperial foot was adapted from an Egyptian measure by the Greeks, with a subsequent larger foot being adopted by the Romans.

The popular belief is that the original standard was the length of a man’s foot. This is most likely true, but when local authorities and national rulers began calibrating and defining measurements, the foot of no human being was probably used as the basis. In rural regions and without calibrated rulers, many units of measurement were in fact based on the length of some part of body of the person measuring (or for example the area that could be plowed in a day). In that sense, the human foot was no doubt the origin of the measuring unit called a \"foot\" and was also for a long time the definition of its length. To prevent discord and enable trade, many towns decided on a standard length and displayed this publicly. In order to enable simultaneous use of the different units of length based on different parts of the human body and other \"natural\" units of length, the different units were redefined as multiples of each other, whereby their lengths no longer corresponded to the original \"natural\" standards. This process of national standardisation began in Scotland in 1150 and in England in 1303, but many different regional standards had existed in both these countries long before.

Read more at Wikipedia.org