the.com/footing
The invisible foot a building stands on, doing all the work, getting none of the credit.
means In construction, the widened base of concrete beneath a foundation that spreads a structure's weight onto the soil; more generally, a secure place to stand or a basis for a relationship or situation.
from From 'foot' plus '-ing,' the part of you that meets the ground made into the part of a thing that does the same. English has long used 'foot' for the bottom of anything — a hill, a page, a bed — so 'footing' naturally came to mean both literal grounding and figurative standing, as in being 'on equal footing' or losing one's footing. The construction sense is just the most literal cousin of all the rest: the building's place to plant its feet.
- goes deep
- Buried below frost line so it never heaves
- spreads load
- Wider than the wall to share weight
- first poured
- The footing exists before the building does
- old idiom
- Lose your footing and everything above falls
startup footing rounds — early-stage funding like y combinator's $500k seed investments that establish new companies