Help!

[lostone]

This chart of shoes sizes appears on Amazon as guidance in buying shoes. It doesn't help me much anyway, since my usual size is 7.5, but I thought since it is stated in inches, it could serve. Can You tell me who has a foot 28.6 inches long? I presume they meant centimeters in the 2nd chart.

 

[crazyfingers]

Ya probably right.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

If you look at the ratio between the wide lengths and the regular lengths, it's approx 2.54. So, yes...it's actually slightly higher consistently but ignore that. It could be a lesser negligible problem.

Anyway, 11 wide length / 11 regular length = 29.9 / 11.7 = 2.5555.. ~= 2.54 the ratio of cm to in

 

[lostone]

Why have sizes at all? Why not just measure them in cm or inches? Clothes sizes ought to be an obsolete thing of the past.

 

[crazyfingers]

Why have sizes at all? Why not just measure them in cm or inches? Clothes sizes ought to be an obsolete thing of the past.

Ya. It's dumb. Just give the measurements.

Same with t-shits and sweatshirts, etc where S, M, L, XL, XXL is not very useful especially when it's inconsistent between manufactures.

 

[Bronzeage]

I wear a 9&1/2, which is a 42 in Europe. Shaquille O'neal wears a size 22, which is 15 inches long. There is definitely something wrong with that chart.

 

[bilby]

Shoe sizes are measured in barleycorns (a barleycorn is a third of an inch) starting from an arbitrary smallest practical size (size zero) for infant shoes; Adult sizes are usually measured from a datum at child size 13.5 = adult size 1, going up in barleycorns from that datum.

It's perfectly simple. The barleycorn was standardised at 1/3" in the 1300s, so the system has been around for a while.

 

[Toni]

I don’t live in an area where it is easy to go shopping for items to wear, other than clothes to wear on a farm or hunting, at least not within 50 miles, especially if you are an unusual size, which I definitely am re: shoes. Well, regular clothes, too. Further than that if I have a prayer of finding shoes small enough ( thank you all of you Asian and Latinx ladies with small feet! At least there is finally sufficient demand to find something in my state!) I have developed 1-4 different brands of shoes that reliably fit me well and are well made enough that I don’t destroy them in under a year.

Those brands and those brands only I will purchase on line. One of those brands is Puma, and then only a couple of styles. BUT they fit really well! I recently found a pair the same color as ones I had more than10 years ago that I loved so much …until they really wore out. Score!

I would never ever buy Pumas through Amazon because I have zero confidence that the shoes are really Pumas, reliably sized or of the same quality as I get when ordering directly from Amazon. There are a couple of department stores that carry the genuine article and I’ll get from those stores ( almost always online because only in the big city stores can I ( sometimes) locate shoes in my size.

 

[Swammerdami]

Some brassieres are shown with both inch and cm measures. I was bemused to note the latter was NOT 2.54X the former. Someone explained that when measuring a woman the inch tape is positioned differently than a cm tape. (Could there be some controversy about how to measure a foot?)

Shoe sizes are measured in barleycorns (a barleycorn is a third of an inch) starting from an arbitrary smallest practical size (size zero) for infant shoes; Adult sizes are usually measured from a datum at child size 13.5 = adult size 1, going up in barleycorns from that datum.

It's perfectly simple. The barleycorn was standardised at 1/3" in the 1300s, so the system has been around for a while.

The barleycorn grain was employed as the unit of weight in ancient Sumeria; the shekel defined as weighing 180 barleycorns. (The grains were taken from the middle of the ear, and counting the largish number helped smooth out variations) This approach to defining weights remained in effect for over 4500 years. A pennyweight is the weight of 24 grains of barley (or 32 grains of wheat); and indeed the silver shekels (as allegedly paid to Judas Iscariot) of Canaan weighed 7.5 times as much as an ancient English silver penny, exactly as expected.

In Thailand the rice grain was the ancient standard, with 6 grains to a solot, 16 solot to a fueang, 8 fueang to a baht. The Kingdom uses grams and kgs now, but Thai gold is still measured with the baht of 15.244 grams, which is indeed the weight of about 768 rice grains.