Barleycorn shoes

How many barleycorns?

Shoe sizes have always baffled me. I’m a size 5 – but 5 what? Is that half as big as a size 10? And why so many different systems for measuring shoe sizes? I’m also a 7 in US sizes and a 38 in European sizes.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just measure in inches or centimetres/millimetres. Apparently this is what’s done in Japan and Korea (clever people).

Anyway, after a bit of research, this is what I found out.

The basic unit of shoe sizes is the barleycorn. One barleycorn is approximately 1/3 of an inch long. So the difference between a size 5 and a size 6 is one barleycorn or 1/3 of an inch.

But to complicate things slightly, a child’s size 0 in shoes is based upon the size of the theoretical smallest foot. This happens to be 12 barleycorns (4 inches) long. So then size 1 is 13 barleycorns long, size 2 is 14 etc. etc. until you hit size 12. Then you switch to adult sizes which begin again at size 0.

Luckily this is continuous so that an adult size 0 is a children’s size 12 (which is 24 barleycorns long) + 1 or 25 barleycorns. We then resume the pattern.

So to calculate the size of a shoe it’s:

Child’s size = 3*length in inches – 12

Adult’s size = 3*length in inches – 25

That’s only for English sizes though. American sizes work on a similar principle but they start at size 1 (not 0) and women’s sizes are increased by 1.5

Europeans don’t use barleycorns. They use something called paris points (2/3cm) and the size is the length of the last in paris points.

But alas there is a catch here. The ‘length’ used in the above calculations is not the length of the shoe or of the person’s foot. It is the length of the last. The last being the template used to build the shoe. From my experience, it tends to be close to the size of the shoe – so the foot would be a bit smaller.