The following known observation is useful in establishing program termination: if a transitive relation R is covered by finitely many well-founded relations U1,..., Un then R is well-founded. A question arises how to bound the ordinal height |R | of the relation R in terms of the ordinals αi = |Ui|. We introduce the notion of the stature ‖P ‖ of a well partial ordering P and show that |R | ≤ ‖α1 × · · · × αn ‖ and that this bound is tight. The notion of stature is of considerable independent interest. We define ‖P ‖ as the ordinal height of the forest of nonempty bad sequences of P, but it has many other natural and equivalent definitions. In particular, ‖P ‖ is the supremum, and in fact the maximum, of the lengths of linearizations of P. And ‖α1 × · · · × αn ‖ is equal to the natural product α1 ⊗ · · · ⊗ αn.