The shoes fit in the shop. Length was checked, the salesperson pressed a thumb past the big toe, there was room, and the walk to the till felt fine. Three weeks later there is a hard yellow ridge of skin on the outside of the little toe, and the shoes are quietly retired to the back of the rack.
Nothing was wrong with the length. The problem is that a foot has two dimensions and most shops sell one of them. The number on the box answers how long your foot is. The letter that should sit next to it answers how wide, and in the large majority of shops that letter has been decided for you, once, for everybody.
The letter after the number is the other half of the size
Width in shoe sizing runs as a letter scale. In the American system the common men's widths climb from B through D to EE and beyond, with D treated as the regular fitting. Women's widths run from AA and A through B to D and wider, with B as the standard. European sizing more often uses word labels or a second number on the last, and British makers have their own letters, so the scales do not translate cleanly across borders.
What travels across all of them is the shape of the problem. A width step is roughly a quarter of an inch of girth at the ball of the foot, which sounds trivial until you notice it also changes how the last curves around the joint and how much room the toes have to splay under your weight.
Buying a longer shoe to gain width is the usual improvised fix, and it partly works, because a longer last is also slightly wider. It also moves the flex point of the shoe past the ball of your foot, so the shoe creases in the wrong place and your foot slides forward on every step. You have traded a pinch for a slide, and the slide is what produces the blister at the heel and the bruised nail at the front.
Sixty three to seventy two percent, and width is the worse half
This is not a rare complaint. Andrew Buldt and Hylton Menz of La Trobe University published a systematic search and narrative review in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Research on 28 July 2018, screening 1,681 citations and including eighteen studies. Their headline number is blunt: between 63 and 72 percent of participants were wearing shoes that did not accommodate either the width or the length of their feet.
Split the two dimensions and width comes off worse. Across the included studies, somewhere between 30 and 88 percent of people were in footwear narrower than their feet, while 14 to 73 percent were in shoes too long. The review singles out width as a particular concern in older people, where one study found 78 percent wearing outdoor shoes narrower than their feet and 81 percent doing the same indoors.
The review also reports associations that turn a fit question into a foot question. Incorrect fit was linked with corns, calluses and lesser toe deformity, and in people with diabetes, those with a current foot ulcer were five times more likely to be in incorrectly fitted shoes than those without one.
A device from 1925 already measured three things
The metal plate you stand on in a shoe shop was not designed to give you a length. Charles Brannock, a Syracuse shoe salesman's son, spent the mid nineteen twenties improving on the wooden size stick the trade used at the time, founded the Brannock Device Company in 1925, and patented the result as U.S. Patent 1,682,366. The National Inventors Hall of Fame describes it as taking the length and the width along with the distance from the heel to the ball of the foot.
Three measurements, and the shop reads one of them aloud. The heel to ball figure decides where the shoe bends, which is why a person with a long forefoot and a short arch length can take a nine in length and still be wrong in every nine on the wall. The sliding bar on the side of the plate is the width scale, and in most shops it is used as a formality because the stockroom holds a single width anyway.
Measuring your own feet on the kitchen floor
You can get the two numbers that matter without a device. Do it in the evening, because feet spread over the course of a day and a morning measurement will flatter you.
- Stand on paper, full weight on both feet. Trace around each foot with the pencil held upright rather than angled under the arch. A seated tracing gives a shorter, narrower foot than the one that actually goes into the shoe.
- Measure heel to longest toe. That is not always the big toe. Record both feet, because most people have one longer foot, and fit the pair to the larger one.
- Measure across the widest part. That is the line through the two joints at the base of the big toe and the little toe. This is the number no size chart asked you for.
- Compare with the maker's own last chart. Good makers publish length and ball girth per size. Where they do not, a retailer that stocks more than one width is worth paying for.
What a cobbler can stretch and what no stretch will fix
Some width problems are repairable after the fact. A leather upper can be stretched on a last, and a repair shop can push out a localised bump with a spot stretcher. A shoe tight by a few millimetres across the joints will often settle.
The limits are structural. The sole and the shank do not stretch, so a last that is narrow through the waist stays narrow underfoot no matter what happens to the upper. Synthetic uppers and coated leathers resist stretching and sometimes crack when forced. And stretching a shoe whose flex point is already in the wrong place does nothing about the flex point, because that was decided by the length you chose.
Buy the width before your next pair of shoes
Write your evening length and ball width for both feet on a card and keep it the way you keep a collar size. Then change the order of the questions the next time you shop. Ask which widths the model comes in before you ask whether they have your size, because a shop that carries one width has already answered the harder question without telling you.
At the fitting, stand rather than sit, and press down on the widest part of the shoe to feel whether the joints are sitting inside the sole or hanging over its edge. Look at the sole from underneath after ten minutes of wear at home: if your foot is wider than the platform it stands on, the upper is doing work the sole was supposed to do, and that is the shoe that produces the ridge of skin three weeks later.
Treat the letter as part of the size. A shop stocking one width per size is offering you a length and hoping the rest works out.