Word.ws English Dictionary

step foot

step foot verb: eggcorn of set foot.

Verb

step foot (third-person singular simple present steps foot, present participle stepping foot, simple past and past participle stepped foot)

  1. (nonstandard, proscribed) Eggcorn of set foot.
    • This was a pleasure of no small kind; and in stepping foot again upon the soil of that country, which contains much that I prize, and more that I admire1813, Washington Irving, “Sketches of an Excursion from Edinburgh to Dublin”, in The Analectic magazine, page 480
    • All the dukes and princes that ever stepped foot in America, never deserved a tenth part of the attention which is due to Prof. Agassiz.1872, Sir Norman Lockyer, Nature: international journal of science, volume 6, page 509

Forms of step foot

third-person singular presentsteps foot
present participlestepping foot
past participlestepped foot
paststepped foot

Origin of step foot

Apparently a blending of step with set foot.

Questions about step foot

What does step foot mean?
Step foot means eggcorn of set foot.
What part of speech is step foot?
Step foot is a verb.
What is the past tense of step foot?
The past tense of step foot is stepped foot.

Words near step foot in the dictionary

  1. step down
  2. step families
  3. step family
  4. step flashing
  5. step flashings
  6. step foot
  7. step forward
  8. step function
  9. step functions
  10. step grate
  11. step grates

Source and license

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