Tallest lists

What the tallest lists cover

This hub collects every ranked list on the site, from the tallest presidents to the tallest statues on Earth. Each list orders its entries from tallest to shortest (the shortest-celebrities list runs the other way), shows heights in both centimeters and feet and inches, draws the top entries to scale, and cites a source for every figure. The lists fall into three families: people in a particular role, built structures, and animals.

How a list gets ranked

People: listed versus measured height

For athletes, the starting point is the height published by the league or team. For other public figures, the site uses height statements on Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia's infoboxes, together with the references attached to each statement, such as an official biography or a Guinness record. Every person's page shows the specific source.

These figures are best described as listed heights. Few public figures are measured under clinical conditions, and many listings were set early in a career and never revisited. Some include shoes, some are rounded, and a few drift over time. The NBA list illustrates the problem: Wikipedia's list of the league's tallest players notes that official NBA sources have listed Manute Bol at both 7′6″ and 7′7″, and that Slavko Vraneš, officially listed at 7′5″ during his playing days, is now given as 7′6″ by most sources. Where reputable sources disagree, the site keeps the cited value and explains the discrepancy on the individual page rather than silently picking a favorite.

Buildings: the CTBUH rules

Skyscraper heights are surprisingly contested, so the site follows the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the body whose rankings are treated as authoritative worldwide. CTBUH measures from the lowest significant open-air pedestrian entrance and defines three heights:

• Architectural top: includes spires but excludes antennas, signage, flagpoles and other functional-technical equipment. This is the basis for the official tallest-buildings ranking and for this site's list.
• Highest occupied floor: the finished floor level of the top occupiable floor.
• Tip: the highest point of any material or function.

A building counts only once it is completed, which CTBUH defines as topped out structurally and architecturally, fully clad and at least partially open for use. Buildings of 300 m or more are classed as supertall and those of 600 m or more as megatall. On the site's list, three buildings clear the megatall line: the Burj Khalifa at 828 m, Merdeka 118 at 678.9 m and the Shanghai Tower at 632 m. One World Trade Center, at 541 m, ranks seventh.

The gap at the top is remarkable: the Burj Khalifa is about 149 m taller than the second-tallest completed building, a margin larger than the full height of many city skylines. The ranking also shows how spires matter. Several buildings lower on the list have roof heights close to their neighbors, but CTBUH counts a permanent architectural spire and not a removable antenna, so design decisions made for aesthetic reasons can decide a building's place in the table.

Statues and animals: read the fine print

Statue heights are published in different ways, and the list respects each statue's own figure. Most are measured without their pedestal, but the Statue of Liberty is commonly quoted from ground to torch, including its pedestal, at about 93 m. That difference is noted in the list's description so you are not comparing apples with oranges. Animal heights are typical adult values and may be standing height, shoulder height or height when rearing up, as stated for each animal. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance gives male giraffes a height of up to about 18 feet (5.5 m) and females about 14 feet (4.3 m); even a newborn calf is about 6 feet tall.

The record holders

The extreme ends of human height belong to a small number of people whose growth was driven by medical conditions. Coverage here is limited to what record-keeping bodies have published.

Robert Wadlow remains the tallest person in recorded history. Guinness World Records lists him at 272 cm (8 ft 11.1 in), measured on June 27, 1940, in the weeks before his death at age 22. Born in Alton, Illinois, in 1918, he wore shoes 47 cm long. On the site, he is listed at the same 272 cm.

Sultan Kösen of Türkiye is the tallest living man, at 251 cm (8 ft 2.8 in) according to Guinness, which first recognized him in 2009. Guinness explains that a pituitary tumor caused his body to produce excess growth hormone, that his growth spurt began around age 10, and that surgery later halted his growth. Pituitary gigantism of this kind is rare; a 2024 case report in Endocrine Oncology notes that a genetic cause can be identified in almost half of cases, most often in the AIP gene.

Rumeysa Gelgi, also of Türkiye, is the tallest living woman. Guinness measured her at 215.16 cm (7 ft 0.7 in) in Safranbolu on May 23, 2021, and attributes her height to an overgrowth syndrome.

Seen together, the gaps are striking. Wadlow was 21 cm taller than Kösen, who is in turn about 20 cm taller than Yao Ming, one of the tallest players in NBA history at 229 cm.

How rare are these heights?

A useful way to read any tallest list is to ask how unusual each height would be in an ordinary population. The CDC's NHANES survey for August 2021 to August 2023 gives US men aged 20 and over an average of 175.1 cm, with the 5th and 95th percentiles at 162.2 cm and 187.2 cm. If heights followed a perfect bell curve with that spread, a standard deviation of about 7.6 cm, the share of men at or above various heights would be:

The table makes two points. First, the presidential and football lists sit within the normal range of human variation: a 6′4″ man is tall but not rare, with roughly one in a hundred American men at that height or above. Second, the bell curve breaks down completely at the very top. A purely statistical model says a 7′7″ man should essentially never occur among the world's eight billion people, yet the NBA has had two. The far tail of human height is heavier than a normal curve predicts, partly because a small number of people have medical conditions, such as excess growth hormone or genetic overgrowth syndromes, that push them far beyond the range explained by ordinary genetic and nutritional variation. Record holders like Wadlow and Kösen belong to that group, which is why they are recorded individually by Guinness rather than predicted by statistics.

The same reasoning works for women. Using the NHANES figures for US women (mean 161.2 cm, 5th to 95th percentiles 149.6 to 172.5 cm), Gwendoline Christie's 191 cm would be about 4.3 standard deviations above average, roughly one woman in a hundred thousand, while Rumeysa Gelgi's 215.16 cm lies so far out that the model again stops being meaningful. You can check where any specific height falls with the height percentile calculator.

What the presidential list tells us about height and power

The tallest-presidents list is the most-visited people ranking on the site, partly because it touches an old question: do voters prefer tall leaders? Abraham Lincoln heads the list at 193 cm (6′4″). Wikipedia's article on presidential heights records that the portrait artist Francis Carpenter measured him at 6′3¾″ "in his stocking-feet," which shows how close the traditional figure is to a real measurement. Lyndon B. Johnson follows at 192 cm, with a 1941 physical exam recording him an inch shorter. James Madison is the shortest at 163 cm (5′4″). Across all presidents, the average is about 180 cm (5′11″).

Modern presidents on the list include Donald Trump at 190.5 cm and Barack Obama, both well above the average American man of their generations. The research is more nuanced than the folklore. A 2013 study by Gert Stulp and colleagues in The Leadership Quarterly found that taller candidates were more likely to win the popular vote, but not more likely to win the presidency, and the number of taller winners did not differ significantly from chance. The study also found that the taller candidate's advantage has grown over time, so analyses that look only at recent elections can overstate the effect.

Reading heights across lists

The lists are most useful when you compare across them. A few patterns stand out:

• Sport selects for height, but differently. The tallest NBA players cluster around 7′4″ to 7′7″ (224 to 231 cm). The tallest NFL players top out around 7′0″, and the tallest footballers at about 6′8″ (203 cm), because soccer rewards agility and endurance over reach, with tall players concentrated among goalkeepers and central defenders.
• Entertainment has outliers both ways. The tallest actors include performers whose height defined their roles, like Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, while the shortest-celebrities list starts with Jyoti Amge at 62.8 cm.
• Female celebrities overlap with average men. At 191 cm, Gwendoline Christie is about 16 cm taller than the average US man, measured at 175.1 cm in the CDC's 2021–2023 survey.

For the typical heights of whole populations, rather than their tallest members, see average height by country.

Using the lists with the comparison tool

Every list page draws its top entries to scale, and any entry with a catalog record can be opened in the 3D height comparison tool. That makes cross-list comparisons easy: stand the tallest president beside the tallest NBA player, a K-pop idol beside a footballer, or yourself beside Robert Wadlow. For buildings, the landmarks hub adds the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid and other structures that do not appear on the skyscraper ranking. The two lists most often opened from this hub are the tallest US presidents and the tallest NBA players.

How the lists are maintained

Lists change. New skyscrapers top out, rookies join leagues and listed heights are revised. When a new building is completed under CTBUH rules or a record is confirmed by Guinness, the relevant list is updated, and each entry keeps its own source so readers can trace any number back to where it came from. If you see a height that conflicts with an official listing, the source line on that entry shows exactly what the site relied on.