Other forms: shoes
A shoe is what you wear on your foot to go outside. A pair of them, laced or slipped on, covering the foot but not the ankle.
The ankle is where the line falls, because anything higher is a boot. English keeps a shoe for every purpose — running shoes, school shoes, dancing shoes — and a whole trade around them, from the cobbler who mends them to the shoehorn that gets them on. The idiom is rich: putting yourself in somebody's shoes means imagining their position, and waiting for the other shoe to drop means expecting more bad news.
1nounshoeA covering for the foot, ending below the ankle.
“He kicked his shoes off at the door.”
Also accepted in games: shoes
The shoe may be named for movement. Proto-Germanic skōhaz is often traced to skehaną, to move quickly, though the origin is genuinely unclear and Wiktionary says so.
Middle English
scho
English, today
shoe
Built from
From Middle English scho. From Middle English scho, sho, from Old English sċōh (“shoe”), from Proto-West Germanic skōh, from Proto-Germanic skōhaz (“shoe”), of unclear etymology; possibly a derivation from skehaną (“to move quickly”), from Proto-Indo-European skek- (“to move quickly, jump”). Eclipsed non-native Middle English sabatine, sabatoun (“shoe”) from Medieval Latin sabatēnum, sabatum (“shoe, slipper”) (compare Old Occitan sabatō, Spanish zapato (“shoe”), French sabot (“wooden shoe, clog”), Italian ciabatta). The archaic plural shoon is from Middle English shon, from Old English scōn, scōum (“shoes”) and scōna (“shoes'”); it is cognate with Scots shuin (“shoes”). See also Scots shae, West Frisian skoech, Low German Schoh, Dutch schoen, German Schuh, bar Schuach, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish sko, txb skak (“balcony”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA