Originally Posted by
Altobelli
TITTLE noun (tit-l)
noun
1. a dot or other small mark in writing or printing, used as a diacritic, punctuation, etc.
2. a very small part or quantity; a particle, jot, or whit: He said he didn't care a tittle.
Quotes
The great singularity of the latter was, that they did not place the dot or tittle over the i; and at the end of words they put the long s.
--*Thomas Curson Hansard,*Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing, 1825
The weaver that, at forty-two, could write such a bit of prose narrative, must have had latent in him, all through his life at the loom, the express genius, perfect save in a tittle or two, of a born man of letters.
--*David Masson,*"Dead Men whom I have known," MacMillan's Magazine, Volume IX, November 1863–April 1864
Origin
Tittle, ultimately from Latin titulus “inscription, superscription, label, ticket, title, etc.” will be familiar to many from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:18), “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” “Jot or tittle” is a hendiadys (a single idea expressed by two words and a conjunction) meaning “smallest detail.” Jot derives from the Greek letter iota (ι), the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet. Tittle also means any accent mark or diacritic, e.g., an acute, a grave, a circumflex (as in á, à, or â). The Spanish word tilde, most familiar in the character ñ (as in año “year), in Spanish means any diacritic mark, e.g., an acute accent marking accentuation of a word accent (as in difícil “difficult”). The Spanish word tilde also is a derivative of Latin titulus. Tittle entered English in the 14th century.