tittle means A surname. It carries an Arena rating of 1750, earned across 21 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, tittle ranks #1,420 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #1,896 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #2,285 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #2,556 of 42,785 for Qualifying.
tittle is pronounced /ˈtɪt.əl/.
Why “tittle” is a great word
A small diacritical mark, particularly the dot atop the letters *i* and *j*, or, by extension, a vanishingly minute amount. From Middle English tytle, titel, titele, from Anglo-Norman titil, titule and Medieval Latin titulus ("small stroke, diacritical mark"), from Latin titulus ("inscription, heading, title"). Unlike a *jot*, which from the Greek *iota* implies the smallest conceivable written scrap, or a *tilde*, a specific, wavy glyph with prescribed phonetic duties, a tittle retains a generic, almost humble materiality—the ghost of its grand original form. It is the precise puncture of the pen that completes an *i*, the smudged speck of ink that misaligns a printed page, the microscopic difference that makes one promise binding and another void—a testament that meaning often hinges on the smallest of points, the tiny stroke that holds the whole word together.
Etymology
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.
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.e.g.“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')
- A small, insignificant amount (of something); a modicum or speck.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- tečka 61% match — A dot diacritic (used to mark consonantal palatalisation). vs tittle →
- dots 59% match — A punctuation mark consisting of three dots, indicating an omission of some text or a sentence which wasn't fully finished, an ellipsis. vs tittle →
- punctus 59% match — The basic dot (‧) used to end a sentence in medieval punctuation (ancestral to the full stop/period). vs tittle →
- dotlet 59% match — A little dot. vs tittle →
- breve 59% match — A semicircular diacritical mark (˘) placed above a vowel, commonly used to mark its quantity as short. vs tittle →
- overdot 58% match — A dot placed above a letter, as a diacritical mark. vs tittle →
- stigme 58% match — A dot used as a punctuation mark in historical Greek texts, especially at the top of the line, equivalent to a period or full stop. vs tittle →
- underdot 57% match — A dot placed below a letter, as a diacritical mark. vs tittle →