Word.ws English Dictionary

footwork

UK/ˈfʊt.wɜːk/

footwork noun: any movement of the feet, especially intricate or complex movement, as in sports or dancing.

Noun

footwork (usually uncountable, plural footworks)

  1. (usually) Any movement of the feet, especially intricate or complex movement, as in sports or dancing.
    • The dancer impressed the crowd with his fancy footwork.
    • The horses impressed the riders with their unerring footwork, and the mountain goats simply astounded everyone with their surefootedness.
  2. (usually) A subgenre of juke/ghetto house and style of street dance that originated in Chicago in the early 1990s.
    • In April, DJ Rashad, a Chicago-based producer and pioneer of the increasingly popular footwork genre, died in a drug-related accident.2015 November 16, Sukhdev Sandhu, “How dub master Kode9 became the hero of zero”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 08 Jan 2021
  3. (informal, usually) Finesse.
    • It took some fancy footwork to make it all happen.

Examples of footwork in a sentence

  • It took some fancy footwork to make it happen.
  • I would choose headwork over footwork anytime!
  • Because on grass and clay the relative importance of footwork is higher.

All 12 example sentences with footwork

Forms of footwork

pluralfootworks

Origin of footwork

From foot + work.

Questions about footwork

What does footwork mean?
Footwork means any movement of the feet, especially intricate or complex movement, as in sports or dancing.
What part of speech is footwork?
Footwork is a noun.
How do you pronounce footwork?
Footwork is pronounced /ˈfʊt.wɜːk/ (UK).
What is the plural of footwork?
The plural of footwork is footworks.

Words near footwork in the dictionary

  1. footwheels
  2. footwhore
  3. footwhores
  4. footwoman
  5. footwomen
  6. footwork
  7. footworks
  8. footworn
  9. footwrap
  10. footwraps
  11. footwriting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: footwork (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-footwork.ogg.

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