“We like to snorkel and he likes doing whatever we are doing with us. So I thought, ‘let’s figure out a way to let him snorkel with us.’”
Did you ever wonder why there is a dot above the lowercase “i” and “j”? Keep reading on to find out.
The lowercase “i” and “j” are the only characters in the English dictionary that includes a diacritic dot, or “tittle.”
Unlike other accents, which are called glyphs, the tittle above an “i” or a “j” doesn’t add meaning to the written letters. The tittle does not change the sound or the meaning, rather just indicates that the “i” and “j” are lowercase.
According to Dictionary.com, the word tittle is derived from the Latin word “titulus,” which means “inscription, heading.”
“The ‘tittle’ initially appeared in Latin manuscripts beginning in the 11th century as a way of individualizing the neighboring letters ‘I’ and ‘j’ in the thicket of handwriting,” Dictionary.com reports. “With the introduction of the Roman-style typeface in the late 1400s, the original large mark was reduced to the small dot we use today.”
The classic saying “to a T” is short for “to a tittle,” which means even the smallest of details are correct.
The more you know!
