A tittle, or superscript dot, is a small diacritic in the form of a distinguishing glyph or jot on a lowercase i and j. Other such diacritics below will be familiar to readers of Spanish:
Dictionary.com offers the following definition for tittle:
Derived from the Latin word titulus, meaning “inscription, heading,” the tittle initially appeared in Latin manuscripts beginning in the 11th century as a way of individualizing the neighboring letters i and j in the thicket of handwriting. With the introduction of the Roman-style typeface in the late 1400’s, the original large mark was reduced to the small dot we use today.
In the expression, “every jot and tittle,” meaning attention paid to the smallest of concerns, the word jot has an interesting etymology of its own. It comes to English as a translation from the Latin word jota, which in turn came from the Greek word iōta, with that word being of Semitic origins. In its original sense, jot refers to a minuscule amount. Today we also use jot as a verb to mean hastily writing something down.
Readers may have encountered the phrase, “to a tittle,” likewise relating to a sense of completeness or thoroughness in action. Though it is speculated that the more contemporary “to a T” was derived from references to objects such as a T-shirt, golf tee, or T-square, it is more likely that it finds its origins in the much older phrase “to a tittle.”
One notable occurrence of tittle is in the King James Bible at Matthew 5:18:
“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”
Tittle first appearing in a play is recorded in 1607 in The Woman Hater by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher:
“I’ll quote him to a tittle.”
Tittle is also found in Lord Byron’s 1819 story, Don Juan. At that time, a tittle was interchangeably known as a jot, and used like our contemporary apostrophe to indicate omitted letters in a word.
“Besides, being less in love, she yawn’d a little,
And felt her veins chill’d by the neighbouring sea;
And so, she cook’d their breakfast to a tittle;
I can’t say that she gave them any tea,
But there were eggs, fruit, coffee, bread, fish, honey,
With Scio wine, — and all for love, not money.”
You might also be interested in the headaches of writing news headlines, why Pikes Peak is spelled without an apostrophe by law, what makes a word autological, or the naughty case of expletive infixations (NSFW)!
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