Shoe Sizes

Foot measurement standards go back further than most sizing systems in use today. Roman shoemakers sized sandals using barleycorns -- the length of a barley grain, about a third of an inch -- and in 1324 England's King Edward II issued a decree formalizing three barleycorns to the inch as an official unit, aiming to end regional inconsistency in shoemaking. That barleycorn unit is still embedded in the modern UK sizing scale, where each whole size step equals one barleycorn.

The next major leap came in 1927, when Charles Brannock, a university student working at his father's shoe store, patented the Brannock Device -- the metal foot-measuring tool still found in shoe stores today. It was the first instrument to measure both foot length and width and convert them directly to a size, and by 1930 it had become the industry-standard fitting tool across the US, Britain, and Canada.

Because the US, UK, and EU sizing scales grew up independently and use different reference points, a shoe that fits a US 10 in one country's chart doesn't always match cleanly in another's. Mondopoint was developed to sidestep the problem entirely by sizing shoes on foot length in millimeters rather than an arbitrary size number. NATO drove its adoption in the 1970s, needing one unambiguous sizing method for military footwear supplied to personnel from many member nations with incompatible national systems.

The system was formalized as ISO 2816 and later ISO 9407, and it remains the standard for specialist footwear such as ski boots and ice skates, where a precise, unambiguous fit matters more than matching a familiar retail size label.