Sole (foot)
bottom part of foot
In humans, the sole of the foot is anatomically referred to as the plantar aspect.
Structure
The glabrous skin on the sole of the foot lacks the hair and pigmentation found elsewhere on the body, and it has a high concentration of sweat pores. The sole contains the thickest layers of skin on the body due to the weight that is continually placed on it. It is crossed by a set of creases that form during the early stages of embryonic development. Like those of the palm, the sweat pores of the sole lack sebaceous glands.
The sole is a sensory organ by which the ground can be perceived while standing and walking. The subcutaneous tissue in the sole has adapted to deal with the high local compressive forces on the heel and the ball (between the toes and the arch) by developing a system of "pressure chambers." Each chamber is composed of internal fibrofatty tissue covered by external collagen connective tissue. The septa (internal walls) of these chambers are permeated by numerous blood vessels, making the sole one of the most vascularized, or blood-enriched, regions in the human body.
The sole and the longitudinal arches of the foot are supported by a thick connective tissue, the plantar fascia. The central component of this tissue extends to the supporting bones and gives two divisions–the medial component and lateral component; thus they define the boundaries of the three muscle compartments of the sole (see below).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sole (foot)” is bottom part of foot. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sole, foot and bottom, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q876082. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sole (foot)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.