Tittle

First in an occasional series of random interesting things I learned from podcasts.

The dot above the letter i is known as a tittle. It never occurred to me that it might have a name other than “dot” since we talk about dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s so regularly, but there you go. The reason it came about was to distinguish the difference between combinations of letters that could be confused in the popular gothic style of handwriting when it was first used. Apparantly, the original symbol was a small crescent oriented like the letter n and placed above the small line representing “i” but it diminished over time – at least until pre-teen girls started replacing them with hearts!

Thanks for this factlet are due to Grammar Girl and her Quick and Dirty Tips.

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