The tallest woman in recorded history was measured at 246.3 cm. The tallest British person in recorded history was a woman, and for fifty years after her funeral nobody could say where her body was. Jane Bunford of Bartley Green, on the western edge of Birmingham, measured 239 cm on her twenty-first birthday in 1916, five centimetres short of eight feet, and her skeleton stood in a case at the University of Birmingham until 2005.
That is why this article is organised around evidence rather than around a countdown. Almost every list of the tallest women ever published online repeats the same ten names and the same ten numbers without saying where any of the numbers came from, and several of them are wrong. Below are the women whose heights were actually measured, the ones whose heights were only ever claimed, and the reasons the two groups should not be printed in the same column.
How a height becomes a record
Three things make these figures harder than they look.
Standing height is the measurement. Guinness World Records and medical practice both use the height of a person standing upright against a vertical scale. Almost every woman on this list developed severe spinal curvature, because a skeleton driven past its design limits by excess growth hormone cannot carry the load. So the tallest women were, in their final years, measurably shorter than they had been. Zeng Jinlian could not stand at all towards the end.
Adjusted estimates get printed as measurements. When a person cannot stand straight, researchers sometimes estimate what they would have measured with a straight spine, by adding segment lengths. That estimate is a useful number and it is not a measurement. Jane Bunford’s famous 2.41 m is one of these. So, arguably, is Zeng Jinlian’s widely quoted 2.48 m, against the 246.3 cm that Guinness currently lists.
Records lag behind lives. Several women here were never visited by a records organisation at all, either because they refused to be exhibited or because they lived somewhere nobody came. Their heights come from doctors, undertakers, journalists or, in Jane Bunford’s case, from a skeleton.
Keep those three points in mind and the list stops being a ranking and becomes something more interesting: a record of how well each case was documented.
The ten tallest women ever measured
| Name | Height | Nationality | Dates | Basis of the figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zeng Jinlian | 246.3 cm (8 ft 1 in) | Chinese | 1964 to 1982 | Guinness record height; commonly quoted as 248 cm |
| Anna Haining Swan | 241.3 cm (7 ft 11 in) | Canadian | 1846 to 1888 | Measured at 17 |
| Jane Bunford | 239 cm standing (7 ft 10 in) | English | 1895 to 1922 | Measured in 1916; 241 cm is a curvature-adjusted estimate |
| Yao Defen | 234 cm (7 ft 8 in) | Chinese | 1972 to 2012 | Reported measurement |
| Sandy Allen | 231 cm (7 ft 7 in) | American | 1955 to 2008 | Guinness title holder in her lifetime |
| Vasiliki Caliandi | 229 cm (7 ft 6 in) | Greek | 1882 to 1904 | Contemporary reports only |
| Sun Fang | 221 cm (7 ft 3 in) | Chinese | born 1987 | Reported, not a Guinness title |
| Malgorzata Dydek | 218 cm (7 ft 2 in) | Polish | 1974 to 2011 | Professional sport listings |
| Zainab Bibi | 218 cm (7 ft 2 in) | Pakistani | 1972 to 2018 | Press reports |
| Rumeysa Gelgi | 215.16 cm (7 ft 0.7 in) | Turkish | born 1997 | Guinness measurement, 2021 |
The order of the first three is not as settled as it looks. Anna Swan’s 241.3 cm and Jane Bunford’s adjusted 241 cm are, within the precision of either, the same height, and Bunford’s directly measured 239 cm is the more defensible figure. Anyone who ranks them to the nearest centimetre is pretending to an accuracy that does not exist.
Jane Bunford, the tallest British person ever recorded
Jane Bunford was born on 26 July 1895 in Bartley Green, in the Northfield district of Birmingham, and died on 1 April 1922 at the family home on Jiggins Lane, aged 26. Her death certificate recorded hyperpituitarism and gigantism. She held the title of tallest woman ever for sixty years, until Zeng Jinlian took it, and she remains the tallest British person in the record books, ahead of every man on the British list, including Neil Fingleton of Durham at 232.6 cm.
A fall at eleven
Until she was eleven, Jane was an unremarkable height for her age, around five feet. Then she suffered a head injury. The accident is usually described as a fall from a bicycle, and the mechanism proposed since has been damage to the pituitary gland, the structure at the base of the brain that regulates growth hormone. Within two years she had reached 1.98 m.
It is worth saying plainly that the causal link is an inference rather than a diagnosis. Nobody imaged her pituitary in 1906. What is documented is the sequence: an ordinary child, a head injury, and then growth that did not stop. The case of Adam Rainer, who was recorded as a dwarf and then as a giant in a single lifetime, is the clearest demonstration of what an unregulated pituitary can do to an adult skeleton.
What she actually measured
| Date or age | Height | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Before the accident, aged 11 | about 152 cm (5 ft 0 in) | Normal for her age |
| 13th birthday, 1908 | 198 cm (6 ft 6 in) | |
| 21st birthday, 1916 | 239 cm (7 ft 10 in) | Her peak standing height |
| Shortly before her death, 1922 | 231 cm (7 ft 7 in) | Spinal curvature had reduced her standing height |
| Record figure | 241 cm (7 ft 11 in) | Estimate of her height with a straight spine |
The 8 cm she lost between 1916 and 1922 is the part of the story that gets left out, and it is the part that explains her. By the end she was in constant back pain and could not straighten up. Undertakers’ records give her coffin as 2.50 m long, probably the longest ever used at a British funeral.
The hair, and the refusal
She was offered work exhibiting herself, as every woman on this list was, and she turned it down. She lived her last years quietly in Bartley Green, seeing only close family.
She did hold a second record, and it is an odd one. Her auburn hair, worn in two plaits, reached her ankles, which on a woman of her height means a length over eight feet. The 1972 edition of the Guinness book listed her for the longest hair in the world.
Fifty years in a Birmingham cabinet
Jane Bunford was buried in April 1922, and the coffin, by later accounts, did not contain her.
Her skeleton went to the Anatomical Museum of the University of Birmingham Medical School. It stood there, as an exhibit, for half a century. The 1971 edition of the Guinness book mentioned an unidentified skeleton of a “tallest giantess” held at a British university, and after publication the university confirmed whose it was. The Daily Mirror ran the story in February 1972, fifty years after her funeral, and only then did the public learn where she had gone.
The skeleton remained on display until 2005, when changes to data protection law finally allowed her relatives to reclaim it. She was given a second, private funeral and buried without a headstone. Without the Guinness entry and the newspaper that followed it, she would not appear on any list of the tallest women, because the only hard evidence of her height was the thing in the cabinet.
Zeng Jinlian, who holds the record
Zeng Jinlian was born on 26 June 1964 in Yuanjiang, in Hunan province, China, and died on 13 February 1982, aged 17, from complications of diabetes. She is the only woman whose recorded height exceeds eight feet. Guinness World Records lists her at 246.3 cm; the figure of 248 cm circulates widely and appears to be an estimate corrected for her spinal curvature. When the organisation considered her case in 1981 it declined to recognise her as the tallest standing woman, because by then she could not stand up straight at all.
She was still growing when she died, which is why her case is always set against Robert Wadlow’s. The commonly reported figures line up almost exactly.
| Age | Zeng Jinlian | Robert Wadlow |
|---|---|---|
| 4 years | 156 cm | 160 cm |
| 13 years | 217 cm | 218 cm |
| 16 years | 240 cm | 240 cm |
| 17 years | 246 cm | 245 cm |
Robert Wadlow reached 272 cm before he died at 22. The usual conclusion, that Jinlian would have passed him, assumes she would have kept growing at the same rate for five more years, which nobody can know. What is fair to say is that at the same ages they were level.
She was diagnosed with acromegaly, and also had scoliosis and diabetes. At a routine medical check at 16 she was recorded at 147 kg, with hands of 25.5 cm and feet of 35.5 cm, which is roughly a UK 17 in men’s footwear. Her immediate family were all of ordinary height. Her story is told in full in our separate piece on Zeng Jinlian, the tallest woman ever.
Anna Haining Swan, married at St Martin-in-the-Fields
Anna Haining Swan was born on 6 August 1846 at Mill Brook, New Annan, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Guinness gives her height as 241.3 cm, measured when she was 17. Her growth was steady rather than explosive.
| Age | Height |
|---|---|
| 4 years | 137 cm |
| 5 years | 142 cm |
| 6 years | 157 cm |
| 11 years | 188 cm |
| 15 years | 210 cm |
At 16 she was recruited to appear at the American Museum on Broadway, on terms that were unusually good for the period: her mother could travel with her, she was paid about $1,000, and she was allowed to continue her education. On 13 July 1865 the museum caught fire while she was inside. The staircase was impassable and she could not fit through a window. Museum staff knocked out a section of wall and lowered her with a winch, a job that reportedly took eighteen men.
The British part of her story is the one American accounts skip. In 1871, touring Europe, she met Martin Van Buren Bates of Kentucky, and they were married in London, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, on 17 June 1871. Guinness still lists them as the tallest married couple ever, with a combined height of at least 461 cm. Bates’s own height is given as a range, at least 219.7 cm and possibly as much as 236.2 cm, which is a reminder that nineteenth century figures for men were not always better documented than those for women. Their story is covered separately in our article on the tallest couple in history.
They settled on a farm in Seville, Ohio, in a house built for them with ceilings of about 4.26 m and doors of about 2.60 m. Their two children both died. A daughter was stillborn on 19 May 1872, weighing 8.2 kg. A son was born on 19 January 1879 weighing 9.98 kg, which Guinness records as the heaviest birth ever, and lived eleven hours. Anna died on 5 August 1888 at Seville, of tuberculosis, the day before her forty-second birthday.
The rest of the verified ten
Yao Defen, 234 cm
Born on 15 July 1972 in Shucheng County, China, and died on 30 November 2012, aged 40. Her gigantism was identified by a doctor when she was 15 and already 2.10 m tall. Her parents were farmers and could not pay for treatment. She tried sport, but her constitution would not take it, and she spent years in travelling exhibitions with her father. A British television documentary eventually funded surgery that slowed her growth and reduced her pain.
Sandy Allen, 231 cm
Born in 1955 in the United States, died on 13 August 2008 aged 53, and the Guinness title holder for tallest living woman for much of her adult life. She had pituitary surgery at 22, which stopped her growth. She wrote a book about her life, Cast a Giant Shadow, and appeared in Fellini’s Casanova and in Side Show. In later years she used a wheelchair, her legs and back having become too painful.
Vasiliki Caliandi, 229 cm
Born in 1882, died in 1904 aged 22, and recorded as living near Corinth in Greece. Almost nothing else survives. Contemporary accounts describe very large hands and feet and eyes “as large as hen’s eggs”, which is the kind of detail that tells you the source was a newspaper rather than a physician. She appears to have avoided circuses and exhibitions.
Sun Fang, 221 cm
Born in 1987 in China. She studied economics at Wuhan University and has worked at director level in a financial institution, and she says very little publicly about her height.
She is frequently described online as the tallest living woman. She is not. Guinness World Records has recognised Rumeysa Gelgi since October 2021, and Sun Fang’s 2.21 m has never been verified by a records organisation. Both things can be true at once: she may well be taller, and there is no measurement to prove it.
Malgorzata Dydek, 218 cm
Born on 28 April 1974 in Poznan, Poland, and the most accomplished athlete on this list. She won the European Championship with Poland in 1999 and was the first overall pick in the 1998 WNBA draft, going on to set block records and to play club basketball in Poland, France, Spain and Russia. Her footwear was a Continental size 54, roughly a UK 18 or 19, although conversions at that end of the scale are approximate and a British size runs about one and a half sizes smaller than the American equivalent.
Her height came from her family rather than from any disorder: her father was reportedly 2.23 m, her grandfather 2.13 m and her mother 1.92 m. She died on 27 May 2011 in Brisbane, Australia, aged 37, after a heart attack while pregnant with her third child, having spent eight days in an induced coma.
Zainab Bibi, 218 cm
Born in 1972 in Pakistan, and reported by the Pakistani press to have reached 7 ft 2 in by the age of 20. She travelled widely, including to the United Kingdom, and in 2006 there were reports that she was seeking to leave Pakistan because of the treatment she received there. She died of a heart attack in Toba Tek Singh, in Pakistan, in July 2018, aged 46. Several English-language lists state that she died in Manchester; the Pakistani reporting at the time of her death does not support that.
Rumeysa Gelgi, 215.16 cm
Born in Turkey in 1997, and the current holder of the Guinness title for tallest living woman, confirmed at 215.16 cm in October 2021. She had first been recognised as the world’s tallest teenager in 2014, at 18.
Her height is caused by Weaver syndrome, a very rare genetic condition that produces accelerated growth along with skeletal differences; she also has scoliosis and fragility in her lower limbs, and uses a wheelchair for longer distances. She is reported to have hands of 24.5 cm and feet of 30.5 cm, roughly a UK 11 or 12. Unlike almost every woman who held the title before her, she is publicly visible by choice, and we have written about her separately in our profile of Rumeysa Gelgi.
Tall claims without a verified measurement
These women are reported at heights that would place several of them near the top of the list. None has a measurement that a records organisation has accepted, and in some cases the surviving evidence is a painting.
| Name | Reported height | Where and when | What survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trijntje Keever | 254 cm | Netherlands, died aged 17 | A painting and local tradition |
| Siddiqa Parveen | 231 cm | India, living | Press reports; no Guinness verification |
| Carolina Rascon | 227 cm | Uruachi, Mexico, born about 1900 | Anecdote |
| Delores Pullard | 227 cm | Louisiana, 1946 to 1971 | Medical record of her surgery |
| Ella Ewing | 224 cm | Missouri, 1872 to 1913 | Circus publicity and photographs |
| Maria Feliciana dos Santos | 224 cm | Brazil, born 1946 | Sporting and television records |
| Maria Fassnauer | 221 cm | Tyrol, 1879 to 1917 | Exhibition records and photographs |
Trijntje Keever is the most-quoted figure on the internet and the least supported. She is said to have been 2 m tall at nine, with feet of 36 cm, and to have died of cancer at 17 while still growing. If 254 cm were correct she would be the tallest woman and one of the tallest people ever recorded, which is exactly why a painting is not enough.
Delores Pullard’s case is the best documented of the group, because it is medical. Born on 13 August 1946 in Louisiana, she was 2.08 m at 14, weighed 195 kg and wore a Continental size 57, roughly a UK 21. On 11 March 1971 she had surgery to remove a tumour from her pituitary gland. It was thought to have gone well; she never recovered, and died on 19 May 1971, aged 24.
Ella Ewing was of normal height until she was nine and 1.82 m at ten. Her parents, farmers in Lewis County, Missouri, kept the promoters away until they found an offer that let them travel with her, and she went on to a seventeen-year career with a circus, wearing what was reported as a Continental size 58, roughly a UK 22. She caught pneumonia in 1912 and died at home on 10 January 1913, after which her father guarded her grave to stop her body being taken for anatomical study, which was not a paranoid precaution in 1913. One figure attached to her story should be set aside: the claim that her family received $250,000 for a week of appearances at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1893 money that sum is implausible by any measure, and no source we can find supports it.
Maria Feliciana dos Santos grew normally until ten, then quickly, and became a basketball player, singer and performer, playing 22 matches for the Brazilian national university side in 1971. After foot surgery in 1995 a third of her foot was amputated and she could no longer walk unaided. She was widowed when her husband died in a car accident, lost her income with him, and lived her last years in poverty.
Maria Fassnauer, born on 28 February 1879 at Ridnaun in the Tyrol, reached 2.16 m by 15. Her parents, poor farmers, refused every exhibition offer until she decided at 27 to tour Europe with her sister. She gave almost all her earnings to her parents. Her contract barred her from appearing in public outside paid exhibitions, which she found hard to bear, and leg ulcers eventually left her unable to stand, at which point the promoters lost interest. She died on 4 December 1917, aged 38. Accounts of her return to the family farm give dates that do not fit that death date, and we have kept the date rather than the narrative.
Other names in the record books
- Marianne Wehde, 218 cm, German, 1866 to 1882
- Kaatje van Dyk, 215 cm, Dutch, born about 1905
- Eleanor Wagner, 214 cm, German, dates unknown
- Rosa Wedsted, 213 cm, Finnish, born 1881
- Uljana Semjonova, 213 cm, Latvian, born 1952
- Lyuba Shilo, 213 cm, Ukrainian, born about 1976
Uljana Semjonova is the odd one out, because she was an athlete rather than a medical case: a two-time Olympic basketball champion with the Soviet Union. Her height is the least settled figure in the list, given variously between about 2.10 m and 2.18 m depending on the source, which for a player whose career was filmed is a good illustration of how loosely these numbers get recorded. The rest are names carried forward from early editions of the record books, with dates that are frequently uncertain, which is why they are listed and not ranked.
How tall is tall for a woman in Britain
These heights are so far outside ordinary experience that they stop meaning anything, so it is worth anchoring them. The last clean national measurement, from the Health Survey for England in 2019, puts mean female height in England at 161.7 cm. Assuming a normal distribution and a standard deviation of about 7.1 cm, which is the figure from large twin studies, the rough picture is this.
| Height | Share of women in Britain above it | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) | 11% | 1 in 9 |
| 173 cm (5 ft 8 in) | 6% | 1 in 17 |
| 178 cm (5 ft 10 in) | 1.1% | 1 in 88 |
| 183 cm (6 ft 0 in) | 0.14% | 1 in 740 |
Those are illustrative figures rather than official ones, but the scale is right, and it puts Jane Bunford in perspective. At her peak she stood 77 cm above the current British female average, which is the difference between an average woman and a woman standing on a kitchen chair. She managed it in a Birmingham suburb in 1916, in a house with ordinary doorways, and declined every offer to make money from it.
If you came here for the dimensions rather than the biographies, our piece on who has the largest feet in the world covers the footwear end of the problem, including why the Continental sizes quoted for most of these women translate so badly into British ones.
Sources
- Guinness World Records, How the former tallest woman’s body went missing for half a century, 2024, for Jane Bunford’s measured and adjusted heights, the hair record, and the history of the skeleton at the University of Birmingham.
- Guinness World Records, Tallest woman ever, for Zeng Jinlian at 246.3 cm and the note on her scoliosis.
- Guinness World Records, Tallest married couple ever, for Anna Haining Swan at 241.3 cm, Martin Van Buren Bates’s height range, and the London marriage of 17 June 1871.
- Guinness World Records, Heaviest birth, 9.98 kg, Seville, Ohio, 19 January 1879.
- Guinness World Records, Turkey’s Rumeysa Gelgi confirmed as tallest woman living, October 2021, at 215.16 cm.
- Dawn, Pakistan’s tallest woman passes away, July 2018, for Zainab Bibi’s death in Toba Tek Singh.
- NHS England, Health Survey for England 2021, part 4: trends, for mean measured female height in England in 2019.