A six-foot, 9-inch Houston resident has the largest feet of any living woman, according to Guinness World Records. Tanya Herbert’s right foot is 13.03 inches long, while her left foot is 12.79 inches long.
She wears a women’s size 18 shoes or a men’s size 16-17, depending on what brand she buys. Although she has the world’s biggest feet, she is not the tallest person, or even the tallest woman on Earth. The world’s tallest woman is 7-foot, 1-inch tall Rumeysa Gelgi, who lives about 60 miles south of the Black Sea in north central Turkey.
Herbert has no choice but to shop for shoes on the internet, since no stores near her carry shoes big enough for her feet. She said other large-footed women she met online offered her some tips so she doesn’t have to always buy men’s shoes.
“I would buy some of the largest shoes I could find online and manipulate those to extend them out a little longer and make them a little wider so that they would fit my feet,” she told Guinness World Records.
While Tanya Herbert has bigger feet than any other living woman, there are historical figures who had much larger feet than her.
For example, Robert Wadlow had feet 18.5 inches long, more than five inches longer than Herbert’s.
Born in 1918, Robert was 8 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 439 pounds. He wore massive size 37AA shoes. Wadlow developed these abnormally large feet as a result of a medical condition called hypertrophy of the pituitary gland. That triggered overproduction of Human Growth Hormone, which caused him to keep growing until his premature death at age 22.
