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50 free Foot trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Feet carry you a hundred thousand miles in a lifetime and hardly anyone knows a thing about them, which is what makes foot trivia so much fun. This quiz starts with the anatomy — how many bones and joints a foot has, which is the biggest, why the big toe is odd one out — then moves through the things that go wrong (bunions, plantar fasciitis, athlete's foot, flat feet) and the people who fix them, including the podiatrist Abraham Lincoln used as a secret Civil War envoy. It also takes the word wherever it goes: the 12-inch foot and why the US survey foot was retired, the 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli footprints, Bigfoot's carved wooden feet, Chinese foot binding, the Ethiopian who won an Olympic marathon barefoot, Cinderella's slipper, toe wrestling in Derbyshire and the oldest shoes ever found. Easy questions ask how many toes a foot has and what athlete's foot actually is; expert ones ask which anatomist named the Achilles tendon and what unit UK shoe sizes are still built on. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the foot, toes, the foot as a unit, foot conditions, footwear and the people and events involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many bones are there in a human foot?
26
Add 33 joints and more than a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments, and two feet hold roughly a quarter of all the bones in the body.
Q 02What is the largest bone in the foot?
The calcaneus
The heel bone sits under the talus, the ankle bone, and is cushioned by a layer of fat.
Q 03How many phalanx bones does the big toe have, unlike the other four toes?
Two
The other four toes have one more each, and the big toe is worked by its own dedicated muscles.
Q 04How many arches does the human foot have?
Three
Two run lengthwise and one across; together they act as shock absorbers and make walking and running more energy-efficient.
Q 05An inherited trait in which the second toe is longer than the big toe is nicknamed what?
Greek foot
Also called Morton's toe, it comes from a dominant gene; the more common longer big toe is the recessive pattern.
Q 06Having more than five toes on a foot is known medically as what?
Polydactyly
Syndactyly is fused or webbed toes, and arachnodactyly describes unusually long, thin 'spider' digits.
Q 07The Achilles tendon holds what record among the tendons of the human body?
Thickest
It joins the calf muscles to the heel bone, and Hippocrates knew it simply as the 'tendo magnus', the great tendon.
Q 08In which year did anatomist Philip Verheyen first record the name 'cord of Achilles'?
1693
He was recalling the myth of Thetis dipping baby Achilles in the Styx while holding him by the heel, leaving that one spot vulnerable.
Q 09A bunion is a deformity of the joint at the base of which digit?
The hallux
That is the big toe; the medical name is hallux valgus, and the little-toe version is a 'tailor's bunion' or bunionette.
Q 10Bunions in 14th- and 15th-century English skeletons coincided with a fashion for what?
Pointy shoes
Roughly 23% of adults have bunions, and women are affected far more often than men.
Q 11Plantar fasciitis causes heel pain that is typically at its worst when?
With the first steps of the day
About 10% of people get it at some point, and heel spurs show up on X-rays in up to half of them.
Q 12Athlete's foot is an infection caused by what kind of organism?
A fungus
Its medical name is tinea pedis, it was first described in 1908, and it affects about 15% of people worldwide.
Q 13Athlete's foot most commonly takes hold in the space between which two digits of the foot?
The fourth and little toes
Q 21Outside the English-speaking world, the foot survives as the standard unit for what?
Aircraft altitude
Civilian air traffic worldwide is still controlled in flight levels measured in hundreds of feet.
Q 22British and US shoe sizes are based on which old English unit, a third of an inch?
The barleycorn
Continental Europe uses the Paris point of two-thirds of a centimetre, and East Asia uses millimetres under the Mondopoint system.
Q 23The metal foot-measuring tool in shoe shops was patented by its inventor in which year?
1925
Charles F. Brannock's device also gives width, with D the standard men's width and B the standard for women.
The fungi thrive around swimming pools and locker rooms, and the same species can spread to the nails and hands.
Q 14In children, the arch of the foot normally finishes developing by roughly what age?
Four to six
Flat feet are common and normal in toddlers; going barefoot on varied terrain helps the arches form.
Q 15Which member of his household staff did Lincoln send on confidential missions to Confederate leaders?
His podiatrist
Isachar Zachrie tended Lincoln's feet; Napoleon and the French kings also kept personal foot doctors.
Q 16The world's first podiatric society was founded in 1895 in which city?
New York
It still operates as the NYSPMA; the first podiatry school opened in 1911, and Britain's society followed a year later at the London Foot Hospital.
Q 17What kind of specialist introduced reflexology to the US in 1913?
An ear, nose and throat doctor
William H. Fitzgerald called it zone therapy; reviews have found no convincing evidence it helps any medical condition.
Q 18Since a 1959 international agreement, the foot has been defined as exactly how many metres?
0.3048
It follows from the yard being fixed at 0.9144 m; the United States is the only industrialised country that still prefers the foot to the metre.
Q 19Which slightly longer variant of the foot, long used in land records, did US standards bodies deprecate in 2022?
The survey foot
It differed from the international foot by only about two parts per million.
Q 20The foot of an adult European-American man is typically about what share of his height?
15%
That gives a 175 cm man a foot of about 268 mm; a study of nearly 1,200 North American men found an average of 26.3 cm.
Q 24In 1938 Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, toured for which kind of business, which gave him free products?
A shoe maker
Wadlow stood 8 ft 11.1 in and needed leg braces to walk; the International Shoe Company footed the bill for his enormous footwear.
Q 25The oldest known footwear, sagebrush sandals found in 1938 in Fort Rock Cave, comes from which US state?
Oregon
They have been dated to between 10,500 and 9,300 years old.
Q 26According to Hesiod, 8th-century BC Greeks wore socks called 'piloi' made from what?
Matted animal hair
The Romans later sewed fabric into fitted socks called udones.
Q 27The Laetoli footprints, preserved in ash 3.7 million years ago, are in which country?
Tanzania
Mary Leakey's team found them in 1976, and they showed that walking upright came before big brains in human ancestors.
Q 28The Laetoli footprints were spotted in 1976 when Andrew Hill fell while dodging what?
A thrown ball of elephant dung
With his face inches from the rock, he recognised fossil animal tracks; the hominin trail excavated by 1978 runs about 24 metres.
Q 29The 1958 'Bigfoot' tracks found by bulldozer operator Jerry Crew in California were about how long?
16 inches
In 2002 the family of his late co-worker Ray Wallace revealed the tools he had used to fake them.
Q 30What did Ray Wallace's family reveal in his basement in 2002, explaining the 1958 Bigfoot tracks?
Carved wooden feet
Wallace had got the idea from Rant Mullens, who used similar wooden feet in the 1930s to scare huckleberry pickers in Washington.