Museology

The last entry is os números de visitantes, and where Portuguese counts people English has a single noun that started somewhere else entirely. « A footfall » is the sound of a step, the tread of one foot on a floor, and in ordinary prose that is all it is: « she heard a footfall on the stair » and nothing more. The retail and museum trades took the word, made it uncountable, and turned it into the count of the people who come through a door. « Footfall was down eight per cent », « the shop was taken for its footfall », « a gallery with no footfall » — in that use the word carries no sound at all, and it has no plural. The two senses never meet, because one is a single audible thing and the other is a figure. Two cautions for the reader of Portuguese. The word belongs to a place somebody walks into, so it is not used of a website, which has « traffic » or « visits » instead. And a afluência is not quite it either: that is nearer to « the turnout ».