tittle
UK/ˈtɪt.əl/
tittle noun: any small dot, stroke, or diacritical mark, especially if part of a letter, or of a letter-like abbreviation; in particular, the dots over the Latin letters i and j.
Noun
tittle (plural tittles)
- Any small dot, stroke, or diacritical mark, especially if part of a letter, or of a letter-like abbreviation; in particular, the dots over the Latin letters i and j.
- The foure pricks or tittles are these. The first is a full prick or period. The second is a comma or crooked tittle.1590, Bales, The Arte of Brachygraphie (quoted in Daid King's 2001 'The Ciphers of the Monks')
- The words "jot" and "tittle" in this passage refer to diacritic marks, that is, dashes, dots, or commas added to a letter to accentuate the pronunciation.1965, P. A. Marijnen, The Encyclopedia of the Bible
- A small, insignificant amount (of something); a modicum or speck.
- I am living fast to see the time when a book that misses its tide shall be neglected, as the moon by day, or like mackerel a week after the season. No man has more nicely observed our climate than the bookseller who bought the copy of this work; he knows to a tittle what subjects will best go off...1704, Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
Verb
tittle (third-person singular simple present tittles, present participle tittling, simple past and past participle tittled)
- To chatter.
Proper noun capitalized: Tittle
Tittle
- A surname.
tittle meaning in Urdu and Malayalam
tittle in Urdu
- نقطہ, ذرہ, بکواس کرنا
tittle in Malayalam
- iota, (little) bit, mite
- തരിമ്പ്, ലവം, ലേശം, സ്വല്പം, അല്പം, ശകലം
Examples of tittle in a sentence
- (the page calls both "a superscript sign (hooklike)" and also a diacritical abbreviation of "er" (er) "tittles")1987, Andrea van Arkel-De Leeuw van Weenen, Möðruvallabók, AM 132 Fol: Index and concordance, page xii
- I don't know whether an umlaut is one or two tittles.2008, Roy Blount, Alphabet juice: the energies, gists, and spirits of letters:
Forms of tittle
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | tittles |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | tittles |
| present participle | tittling |
| past participle | tittled |
| past | tittled |
Origin of tittle
From Middle English tytle, titel, titele, from Anglo-Norman titil, titule and Medieval Latin titulus (“small stroke, diacritical mark, accent”), from Latin titulus (“title”). Doublet of tilde, titer/titre, title, titlo, and titulus.
From Middle English titillen, tytyllen, perhaps variants of Middle English tutelen (“to whisper, chatter”), from tutel (“mouth”), from Old English *tūtel, *tȳtel, related to Old Frisian tūte (“mouth”). Compare Middle English touten (“to jut out, project, protrude”), Middle English toute (“projection, mound, hill”), Middle Dutch tûte (whence modern Dutch tuit (“spout, nozzle, nose, point, peak, summit”)), Old Norse túta (“a teat-like prominence”), Danish tude (“spout”).
Words formed from tittle
Questions about tittle
- What does tittle mean?
- Tittle means any small dot, stroke, or diacritical mark, especially if part of a letter, or of a letter-like abbreviation; in particular, the dots over the Latin letters i and j.
- What is tittle in Urdu?
- Tittle in Urdu is نقطہ, ذرہ, بکواس کرنا. See Tittle meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use tittle in a sentence?
- (the page calls both "a superscript sign (hooklike)" and also a diacritical abbreviation of "er" (er) "tittles")
- What part of speech is tittle?
- Tittle can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce tittle?
- Tittle is pronounced /ˈtɪt.əl/ (UK).
- What is the plural of tittle?
- The plural of tittle is tittles.
Words near tittle in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tittle (page history and authors); Tittle (page history and authors); tittle (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tittle (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: en-au-tittle.ogg.
Cite this entry: “tittle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tittle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.