regel

The plain sense is the body part you stand on, and most of the time that is all the word means: feet that are washed for a guest, feet that stumble or are caught in a trap, the soles that press the ground. From that bodily core the same word reaches in several directions, all of them rooted in what a foot actually does.

Because you stand on your feet, the foot becomes the language of power and submission: enemies are put under the feet, a throne has a footstool, a servant sits or falls at his master's feet. Because you walk on your feet, the foot stands for the whole course of a life: feet that run to do harm, a path that the feet are told to keep, a word that is a lamp to the feet. And because the lower body is private, the foot is also a polite way of naming what decency leaves unspoken, so to wash, cover, or uncover the feet can quietly mean something other than the literal limb.

These are not separate words but one word stretched by ordinary metaphor, and the context almost always makes plain which use is meant. The reader's task is to hear the bodily image still working underneath: standing, walking, treading, or the modesty of the lower body.

In a handful of places the plural of this word does not mean feet at all but means times, in the sense of counting occurrences: three times a year, you have struck me these three times. The link is the rhythm of walking, the regular beat of footfalls marking off repeated steps, which became a way to count repeated instances.

This is a genuinely separate meaning, not a shade of the foot sense. A reader needs the English word times, not feet, for it to make sense, and the standard lexicons list it as its own entry. It is rare and easy to spot, since it always sits next to a number.