underfoot

UK/ʌndəˈfʊt/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ʌndəˈfɵt/

underfoot adjective: situated under one's foot or feet.

Adjective

underfoot (not comparable)

Situated under one's foot or feet.
In the way; placed so as to obstruct or hinder.
- We'd go to the Downbeat Club, on Fifty-second Street, and I'd be so underfoot that Billie couldn't miss me.2006, Whitney Balliett, American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song, page 199
- You ask a lot of questions, Morty. Not very charismatic. It makes you kind of an [belch] under [belch] underfoot figure.2013, Rick and Morty: Pilot
Downtrodden; abject.

Adverb

underfoot (not comparable)

Under one's foot or feet.
- The workers were all big, burly, hard-hearted men, tromping through the marsh in their heavy boots without sparing so much as a single thought for the masses of tiny frogs they crushed underfoot.
- The green turf was velvet underfoot.1895, S. R. Crockett, A Cry Across the Black Water
In the way; situated so as to obstruct or hinder.
- It would be easier to do a big project like that someday when we don't have a bunch of newcomers underfoot.
- If you're not going to help, at least get out from underfoot.1978, Tom Reamy, Blind Voices

Noun

underfoot (plural underfoots)

A storage compartment that sits below the deck of a boat.
- In the early stages of fishing, storage space for wet fish was extremely limited, as three pounds on either side, and most of the staging and underfoots, contained ice, leaving only two empty pounds for stowage.1957, Report on an Experiment Into the Freezing of Fish at Sea, page 30
- All too often saithe are put away with an inadequate amount of ice on them, or stowed in deep shelves or underfoots, where they become badly squashed and spoil more rapidly.1970, Torry Advisory Note - Issues 43-69, page 5

Verb

underfoot (third-person singular simple present underfoots, present participle underfooting, simple past and past participle underfooted)

(transitive) To provide a footing beneath; to shore up or underpin.
- A builder was employed to underfoot a tenement, but the work having been improperly executed, damage was caused to adjoining houses.1856, The Scottish Jurist
- The two courses which were open to them were, — on the one hand, to underfoot the building ; and, on the other, to take it down, with the view of its being re-erected on the same site, or elsewhere ; if they should have the means of doing so.1870, Cases Decided in the Court of Session, Teind Court, Etc.
To assign a column summary that is less than the sum of all the entries in that column.
- Another device is to underfoot the accounts receivable column and the net cash column in the record of cash receipts and to underfoot the debit or overfoot the credit side of one or more accounts in the customer's ledger by equal amounts.1932, Frank Hatch Streightoff, Advanced Accounting, page 140
- Stay away from the client or taxpayer who conceals, pads, overstates or understates, alters, duplicates, overfoots or underfoots, diverts, manipulates, omits, falsifies and flagrantly disregards the IRS regulations.1980, The CPA Journal - Volume 50

underfoot meaning in Urdu

underfoot in Urdu

ادنیٰ, نیچے, پاؤں تلے, رذیل, تلے, ذلیل

Examples of underfoot in a sentence

Progress was very slow owing to heavy floes and deep underfoots, which necessitated frequent stoppages of the engines.1999, Ernest Shackleton, South: The Endurance Expedition to Antarctica, →ISBN, page 283:
The result was to bring out the fact, which is now established beyond all doubt by the proof, that any attempt to underfoot the steeple would have been an entire mistake.1904, Sir John Rankine, The Scots Revised Reports, page 774:

All 32 example sentences with underfoot

Forms of underfoot

Noun
plural	underfoots
Verb
third-person singular present	underfoots
present participle	underfooting
past participle	underfooted
past	underfooted

Origin of underfoot

From Middle English underfoote, underfote, equivalent to under- + foot. Cognate with Middle Dutch ondervoet (“underfoot”). Compare also Middle Low German undervôt (“pedestal, base”).

Questions about underfoot

What does underfoot mean?: Underfoot means situated under one's foot or feet.
What is underfoot in Urdu?: Underfoot in Urdu is ادنیٰ, نیچے, پاؤں تلے. See Underfoot meaning in Urdu.
How do you use underfoot in a sentence?: Progress was very slow owing to heavy floes and deep underfoots, which necessitated frequent stoppages of the engines.
What part of speech is underfoot?: Underfoot can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce underfoot?: Underfoot is pronounced /ʌndəˈfʊt/ (UK).

Words near underfoot in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: underfoot (page history and authors); underfoot (Urdu Wiktionary) (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: 2026-09-02

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

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