Today's Word "Tittle"
Published in Vocabulary
tittle \TIT-ehl\ (noun) - 1 : A small jot, the dot of an [i], cross on a [t], the beard on [c], or a diacritic such as the tilde on [n]; 2 : something minute, incredibly tiny, smaller even than an iotaindeed, an iota (Greek short [i]) is capped by a tittle.
"When Lucinda dropped her ice cream cone on Hardy Root's head, he didn't move a tittle."
Today's word entered Old English as titul from Medieval Latin titulus "diacritical mark," the diminutive of Latin, title "inscription, superscription." The same Latin word developed into Spanish tilde "accent, tilde; blemish." As early as 1607 Francis Beaumont wrote in his play, The Woman Hater, "I'll quote him to a tittle," meaning precisely, without omitting so much as a tittle. Somewhere over the years that followed, "to a tittle" was apparently confused with the phrase, "cross all your Ts (and dot your Is)," which also referred to exactitude. Ultimately, "to a tittle" was reduced to "to a T." Now we can quote or describe someone to a T, meaning absolutely exactly.
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