Word.ws English Dictionary

four foot

four foot noun: the space between the rails on a standard gauge railway line. Also the alternative form of 4-foot.

Noun

four foot (uncountable)

  1. (colloquial) the space between the rails on a standard gauge railway line.
    • When placed in the four foot it should be so arranged that a loose carraige coupling shall not strike the box, as such a blow might possibly break it.1877, William Edward Langdon, The Application of Electricity to Railway Working, Page 230
    • Cattle are of course liable to stray on the line at these level crossings, but to prevent this, barriers are placed on each side of the crossing, and a deep trench is made in the four-foot and six-foot spaces, …1882, George P. Neele, Atlantic and American Notes, M'Corquodale & co., limited, Page 54

Also used as

four foot is also the alternative form of 4-foot.

Forms of four foot

alternative form4-foot
alternative formfour-foot

Origin of four foot

From the 4 feet 8½ inch (1435 mm) distance between the rails on a standard gauge railway.

Questions about four foot

What does four foot mean?
Four foot means the space between the rails on a standard gauge railway line.
What part of speech is four foot?
Four foot is a noun.

Words near four foot in the dictionary

  1. Four Floors of Whores
  2. four flush
  3. four flushed
  4. four flushes
  5. four flushing
  6. four foot
  7. Four Freedoms
  8. Four Horsemen
  9. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
  10. four hundred
  11. Four Knights Game

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: four foot (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: “four foot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/four_foot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.