walk a mile in someone's shoes
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.99 in modern English
38
Scrabble Score
24
Letters
3
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To experience what someone has experienced.
Example Sentences
- "It's likely that he didn't begrudge what he had paid Marshall though, because he thought he had finally found a medical person who had walked a mile in his shoes."
- "Michael Poulin, associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and colleagues showed in their 2017 study that an “imagine others” perspective leads to less stress than an “imagine self” perspective (i.e., walking a mile in someone else’s shoes)."
Etymology
From walk + a + mile + in + [possessive pronoun] + shoes. Originally, and still chiefly, found in admonitions not to judge a person until one has walked a mile in that person's shoes.
Inflected Forms
walks a mile in someone's shoes (present, singular)
walking a mile in someone's shoes (participle, present)
walked a mile in someone's shoes (participle, past)
walked a mile in someone's shoes (past)