The Dot on an i Is Called a Tittle

The small mark floating above a lowercase i or j is a tittle. Not a dot, officially — a tittle, from the Latin titulus, a label or heading, which arrived in English through the same medieval scribal vocabulary that gave us so much of how a page is put together.

It exists because of handwriting. In the cramped scripts of the eleventh century, an i was a single short stroke, and a word like minimum became a picket fence of identical marks that even a careful reader had to count. Scribes started adding a small stroke above the i to tell it apart from the timber around it. That stroke leaned, thickened, shrank, and settled down into the dot we now use without noticing.

The word survives in one phrase almost nobody connects to it. To do something to a tittle means to do it to the smallest possible detail — down to the last dot on the last i. It is the same idea as dotting the i's, only four centuries older and rather more elegant.

And the tittle can be taken away again. Put a capital on the front of the word and it vanishes, which makes it one of the very few letter parts that a font can simply decide you no longer need.