Word.ws English Dictionary

crepida

crepida noun: a type of footwear consisting of a sole attached to the foot with fairly elaborate straps, distinguished by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans from sandals proper but now usually considered a style of sandal.

crepida: a type of footwear consisting of a sole attached to the foot with fairly elaborate straps,...
Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

crepida (plural crepidae)

  1. (Ancient-Rome, Ancient Greece) A type of footwear consisting of a sole attached to the foot with fairly elaborate straps, distinguished by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans from sandals proper but now usually considered a style of sandal.
    • There was likewise found an abundant variety of shoes; the heavy caliga, or sandal, worn by the Roman soldiers, studded under the sole with large-headed nails, the calceus or buskin (3) and the more delicate crepida (4), or slipper looped in the leather on each side of the instep, in like manner...1854, “Ancient London.—No. IX.”, in The Home Friend; A Weekly Miscellany of Amusement and Instruction, volume IV, number 91, London: […] Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge […], pages 300–301
    • The museum, though small, contains some very interesting objects classified in groups. In one case are Roman and other shoes, sandals, and crepidæ; […]1866 July 20, “The Annual Congress of the Archæological Institute”, in The Building News and Engineering Journal: […], volume XIII, London: […] Proprietor of the “Building News,” [John Passmore...

Examples of crepida in a sentence

  • The sole of the crepida was usually thick and leather covered the sides and heel of the foot.1948, R[uth] Turner Wilcox, “Roman Footwear”, in The Mode in Footwear, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Charles Scribner’s...
  • What restlessness could have made the goddess trample the earth so fast under the crepidae twisted up on her legs like the sandals of our Romanian frontier guards.1984, Romanian Review, volume 38, page 74:
  • Crepidae often covered the foot up to or including the ankle, and they sometimes covered the toes, not a regular feature of the sandal.1994 December, Norma Goldman, “Roman Footwear”, in Judith Lynn Sebesta, Larissa Bonfante, editors, The World of Roman Costume (Wisconsin...
  • He had even been known to go out and about dressed in ancient Macedonian style to mimic his hero – the flat kausia hat and the crepidae shoes.2019, Alex Gough, Emperor’s Knife (The Imperial Assassin; 2), London: Canelo, published 2022, →ISBN:

Forms of crepida

pluralcrepidae

Origin of crepida

Learned borrowing from Latin crepida, from Ancient Greek κρηπίς (krēpís). Doublet of crepis.

Questions about crepida

What does crepida mean?
Crepida means a type of footwear consisting of a sole attached to the foot with fairly elaborate straps, distinguished by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans from sandals proper but now usually considered a style of sandal.
How do you use crepida in a sentence?
The sole of the crepida was usually thick and leather covered the sides and heel of the foot.
What part of speech is crepida?
Crepida is a noun.
What is the plural of crepida?
The plural of crepida is crepidae.

Words near crepida in the dictionary

  1. crepers
  2. crepes
  3. crepes de Chine
  4. crepes suzette
  5. crepey
  6. crepida
  7. crepidae
  8. crepidoma
  9. crepidomas
  10. crepidomata
  11. crepidotaceous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crepida (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “crepida.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crepida. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.