I was having dinner with a friend the other night and we got on the subject of how many legs a table should have. He said that it depended on how you count them, so I decided to do some research.

After looking through several sources, I found that there were several different ways to count four legged tables. The most common way was to count all four legs as one leg, which means that there is only one leg under a four legged table. However, there were two other ways to look at this problem:

Count each leg separately and get three legs under a four legged table – this makes sense because you would not call a chair with 3 legs a “3 legged chair” or even an “unbalanced chair” but rather just a “chair” – so why would you call something with 4 legs an “unbalanced table”?

Count all four legs together and get 2 legs under a 4 legged table – this makes sense because if you have 5 fingers on one hand and 1 finger on another hand, you still have 6 fingers total (5+1=6).

Last modified: October 29, 2022