Tittles

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Small diacritical marks that distinguish vowel sounds, such as dots over letters like 'i' and 'j'
2. Minor typographical features that enhance clarity in written language, notably seen as accents or dots
3. Tiny symbols that serve a specific purpose in scripts, often marking pronunciation for certain characters

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "tittle" is that it has two unrelated origins that happen to share a sound. One line runs through Latin "titulus," meaning "title" or "inscription," which passed through Medieval Latin to mean a small stroke or diacritical mark, the sense that gave us the dot over an "i" or the small mark on a letter. English took the word from Anglo-Norman "titil" and "titule" in the Middle Ages, and its close relatives include "tilde," "title," and "titre." The other origin is quite different. A separate Middle English verb "titillen" or "tytyllen" probably grew from "tutelen," meaning "to whisper" or "chatter," itself linked to an Old English word for "mouth" and to Dutch "tuit," meaning a spout or nozzle. That family of words is about projections and protrusions, so the two strands meet only by coincidence in English. The plural "tittles" is the form you will meet in scripts, where it refers to these small marks.