Word.ws English Dictionary

dit

/dɪt/

dit verb: to stop up; block (an opening); close (compare Scots dit).

Verb

dit (third-person singular simple present dits, present participle ditting, simple past and past participle ditted)

  1. (Northern England, UK, dialectal) To stop up; block (an opening); close (compare Scots dit).
  2. (obsolete) To close up.
    • that I would haue thought my sincere plainnesse in that first part vpon that subiect, should haue ditted the mouth of the most enuious Momus1599, James VI and I, Basilikon Doron

Noun (1)

dit (plural dits)

  1. (obsolete, rare) A ditty, a little melody.
    • No bird, but did her shrill notes sweetly sing; / No song but did containe a louely dit: / Trees, braunches, birds, and songs were framed fit [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (obsolete) A word; a decree.

Noun (2)

dit (plural dits)

  1. The spoken representation of a dot in radio and telegraph Morse code.

Noun (3)

dit (plural dits)

  1. decimal digit

Adjective

dit (not comparable)

  1. (Canada, obsolete) Indicator of a declared surname originating from Canadian French.

Noun (4)

dit (plural dits)

  1. (UK, slang) An anecdote or yarn.
    • Spinning dits comes with a few guidelines. The established dit litany is fairly simple: you must simply state a geographic datum for the dit, followed by the amount of alcohol that had been consumed immediately prior to the events […]2022, Paul Tremelling, Harrier: How To Be a Fighter Pilot

Noun (5) capitalized: DIT

DIT (countable and uncountable, plural DITs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of diet-induced thermogenesis.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of digital intermediate technician.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of digital imaging technician.
    • In 2022, nearly every movie and TV show has a dedicated DIT who works with the cinematographer and the director to figure out what an image might look like after it’s been run through a series of digital filters.2022 January 10, Emily VanDerWerff, “Colors: Where did they go? An investigation.”, in Vox

Forms of dit

Verb
third-person singular presentdits
present participleditting
past participleditted
pastditted
Noun
pluraldits
pluralDITs

Plural of dit: dits

Origin of dit

From Middle English ditten, dütten, from Old English dyttan (“to stop up, close”), from Proto-West Germanic *duttijan, from Proto-Germanic *duttijaną, from *duttaz (“wisp”), akin to Icelandic dytta. Related to Old English dott (“dot, point”). More at dot.

Variant of dite.

Imitative.

Words formed from dit

Words that rhyme with dit

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dit

What does dit mean?
Dit means to stop up; block (an opening); close (compare Scots dit).
What part of speech is dit?
Dit can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce dit?
Dit is pronounced /dɪt/.
What is the past tense of dit?
The past tense of dit is ditted.

Words near dit in the dictionary

  1. disyoke
  2. disyoked
  3. disyokes
  4. disyoking
  5. diszoochory
  6. dit
  7. dit da jow
  8. Dita
  9. dita bark
  10. DITA-OT
  11. ditactic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dit (page history and authors); DIT (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-dit.wav.

Cite this entry: “dit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.