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underfoot

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underfoot

  • /ʌndəˈfʊt/ UK
  • /ʌndəˈfɵt/ British, Southern, Standard
  • /ʌndɚˈfʊt/ US
  • /ʊndəˈfʊt/ Northern England
  • /ʌndəɾˈfʉt/ Scotland
  • /ʌndəɻˈfʉt/ Northern Ireland

Where it comes from

From Middle English underfoote, underfote, equivalent to under- + foot. Cognate with Middle Dutch ondervoet (“underfoot”). Compare also Middle Low German undervôt (“pedestal, base”).

adjective

  1. not comparable Situated under one's foot or feet.
  2. not comparable In the way; placed so as to obstruct or hinder. We'd go to the Downbeat Club, on Fifty-second Street, and I'd be so underfoot that Billie couldn't miss me.
  3. not comparable Downtrodden; abject.

adverb

  1. not comparable Under one's foot or feet. The workers were all big, burly, hard-hearted men, tromping through the marsh in their heavy boots without sparing so much as a single thought for the masses of tiny frogs they crushed underfoot.
  2. not comparable In the way; situated so as to obstruct or hinder. It would be easier to do a big project like that someday when we don't have a bunch of newcomers underfoot.

noun underfoots

  1. A storage compartment that sits below the deck of a boat. In the early stages of fishing, storage space for wet fish was extremely limited, as three pounds on either side, and most of the staging and underfoots, contained ice, leaving only two empty pounds for stowage.

verb underfoots · underfooting · underfooted

  1. transitive To provide a footing beneath; to shore up or underpin. A builder was employed to underfoot a tenement, but the work having been improperly executed, damage was caused to adjoining houses.
  2. To assign a column summary that is less than the sum of all the entries in that column. Another device is to underfoot the accounts receivable column and the net cash column in the record of cash receipts and to underfoot the debit or overfoot the credit side of one or more accounts in the customer's ledger by equal amounts.

Translations

Every language

adv under one's feet

Españoldebajo de los pies, bajo los pies
日本語足元に ashimoto ni
中文在腳下 /在脚下 zài jiǎoxià
Françaissous les pieds
Deutschunter den Füßen, unter die Füße
Русскийпод нога́ми pod nogámi, под но́ги pod nógi

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Cite this
MLA

"underfoot." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/underfoot. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026.

APA

underfoot. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/underfoot

Chicago

"underfoot." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/underfoot.

BibTeX
@misc{underfoot_2026,
  title = {underfoot},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/underfoot},
  urldate = {2026-11-06}
}