How to Check Foot Width

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Finding a good pair of comfortable shoes is easy for some people and quite difficult for many others. While shoe stores will measure your foot length, they may ignore your foot width. Foot width has an important role to play in your finding comfortable shoes. Measuring your own foot width is a useful exercise that will help you find good-fitting shoes.

Put on socks and lay a blank piece of paper on a flat floor surface.

Stand with one foot on the blank piece of paper. Stand in a comfortable, normal, resting position.

Mark the widest spot of your foot on the piece of paper using the pencil. The widest area of a foot is almost always over the ball of your foot just below the base of your big toe. Measure your other foot in the same way.

Take the piece of paper from the floor. Use a measuring tape to measure the number of inches between the marks you made.

Use an inch-to-size chart such as the chart at 2BigFeet.com (see Resources) to find out your foot-width size.