| 词组 | foot |
| 释义 | foot Foot has three plurals. The regular one is feet. The second is foots, which is used in only a couple of specialized senses (for instance, when foots means "footlights"): • He wanted to jump over the foots after the guy — Gail Garber, quoted in John Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, 1969 The third is the zero form foot. This plural also has limited use. It is used in the chiefly British sense of "foot soldiers, infantry": • ... the majority of the foot, as of old, were pikemen and billmen —James A. Williamson, The Tudor Age, 1964 The more common use of the plural foot is in the sense of the nonmetric unit of measure, and even here it is restricted. It regularly occurs (and feet does not) between a number and a noun. In this position it is usually joined to the number with a hyphen. • ... cleared a seven-foot fence to get away —Sports Illustrated, 24 Apr. 1967 • ... the 15-foot high statue —Ronald Leir, Jersey Jour, and Jersey Observer, 23 Apr. 1985 • ... a 340-by-120-foot auditorium —Norris Willatt, Barron's, 9 Feb. 1970 • ... the twenty-eight foot thirteen-ton cutter Gipsy Moth III —Current Biography, December 1967 The plurals feet and foot both occur between a number and an adjective: • ... is five feet six inches tall —Current Biography, October 1965 • ... neither the Russians nor the Chinese were ten foot tall —Michael Howard, Times Literary Supp., 21 Dec. 1979 • ... six foot wide and four foot deep —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 In present-day American printed use, feet is more common than foot, and is prescribed by many handbooks. Foot seems to be more frequent in print in British English. In speech, foot is common in both varieties: • He was a short man, only about five foot six —Harry S. Truman, quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking, 1973 • ... ten to eleven thousand foot deep —Margaret Thatcher, speech to National Press Club, 19 Sept. 1975 Evans 1957 points out that formerly foot could always be used as a plural after a number, even if it is not immediately followed by a noun or adjective. This practice is less common now. We see it sometimes in British English: • ... wingless ants have been captured at heights up to 5,000 foot —V. B. Wigglesworth, Nature, 16 Nov. 1973 In American English we find it chiefly in speech: • It was about 12-foot plus —surfer quoted by Robert Sherrill, N. Y. Times Mag., 16 July 1967 • ... which is 15 foot in diameter —Leon Lederman, speech at meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1977 Many of the handbooks take the erroneous position that foot is only a singular and that feet is the only correct plural. The plural foot is limited to the uses shown here, but in them it is not an error. Belief that foot is wrong leads to this sort of unthinking hypercorrec-tion: • ... which grows to a height of one feet —N. Y. Times, 6 July 1980 |
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英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。