The Dot on an i Is Called a Tittle

Look closely at the letter i in this sentence. That tiny mark floating above it has a name, and the name is wonderful: it is called a tittle. As Dictionary.com explains, the small distinguishing mark over a lowercase i and a lowercase j is called a tittle, a word for a small point or stroke in writing and printing. Most of us write thousands of them every year without once wondering what they are called, which seems a little unfair to such a hard-working dot.

The word has a long history. According to Dictionary.com, tittle comes from the Latin word titulus, meaning an inscription or heading. Over the centuries it drifted from that grand meaning towards something much smaller. The phrase site phrases.org.uk explains that a tittle was once a mark placed over a letter to show that a repeated letter had been left out, and that the word later came to mean any small stroke or point in writing or printing, particularly the dot over the letter i.

The dot itself exists for a practical reason. Dictionary.com reports that the tittle first appeared in Latin manuscripts beginning in the eleventh century, as a way of telling the letters i and j apart from their neighbours in the thicket of handwriting. When words were written by hand in closely packed strokes, a small mark above the right letter made a page much easier to read. It was, in effect, a tiny signpost saying: this one is an i.

Its neat, round shape came later. According to the same article, when Roman-style typefaces were introduced in the late 1400s, the original, larger mark was reduced to the small dot we use today. So the familiar dot is the product of both scribes and printers: invented to help readers make sense of handwriting, then tidied up when books began to be printed with metal type.

The tittle also lives on in the language. Phrases.org.uk explains that a jot or tittle means a tiny amount, and that the phrase entered English through William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in 1526, later appearing in the King James Version of 1611. And Dictionary.com notes that the everyday expression to a T, meaning done exactly right, likely comes from an earlier form, to a tittle. If so, every time something fits you to a T, it fits you down to the very last dot.

So the next time you dot an i, you are doing something scribes began nearly a thousand years ago, and giving a tiny mark with a grand Latin ancestor its moment on the page. The tittle is small enough to forget and useful enough to keep. Pleasingly, it also disappears the moment you write a capital I, which does not need the help. Only the lowercase letters get the dot, and now, at last, the dot gets its name.