Not an ancient character professional but based on my understanding of ancient books.

尺: the glyph is a drawing of a fore arm, with a big dot or line pointing at the long part, indicating what it is referring to. The fore arm was often used as a tool to quickly measure length. That's why this character is used as "foot", just as British used foot to measure.

乇: the original meaning is, as dictionary said, 垂穗. However, that usage was then dropped. Instead, it was borrowed to mean "delegate". And later, more annotation was added, so the character used become 托.

The two are not related. But because their glyphs are similar, it was easy to mess up. People wasn't so accurate on writing/carving back then, as long as the meaning can be corrected told from context. A similar example are 月 and 肉。

Not an ancient character professional but based on my understanding of ancient books.

尺: the glyph is a drawing of a fore arm, with a big dot or line pointing at the long part, indicating what it is referring to. The fore arm was often used as a tool to quickly measure length. That's why this character is used as "foot", just as British used foot to measure.

乇: the original meaning is, as dictionary said, 垂穗. However, that usage was then dropped. Instead, it was borrowed to mean "delegate". And later, more annotation was added, so the character used become 托.

The two are not related. But because their glyphs are similar, it was easy to mess up. People wasn't so accurate on writing/carving back then, as long as the meaning can be corrected told from context. A similar example is 月 vs 肉。