It's the little things

tittle / tit-êl / noun

1. A small jot, such as the dot of an "i", the cross on a "t", the tiny beard (cedilla) on "ç", or the tilde atop Spanish "ñ", as in cañón "canyon".
2. Something minute, incredibly tiny, smaller even than an iota; indeed, the dot on an iota (Greek short "i") is a tittle.

Linguist Robert Beard, editor of excellent alphaDictionary, notes: this noun is unrelated to the verb (to) tittle, which was clipped from the rhyme compound tittle-tattle. Nor should it be confused with a titter "a suppressed giggle". Think of a tittle as the smallest thing or amount visible without a magnifying glass.

Tittle, Dr. Beard writes, originally referred to those itsy-bitsy appendages, diacritical marks, that are added to letters in some languages, "Red Ard almost failed French for consistently omitting the tittles on his written French." Although we classify today's word as a noun, it probably is used today more often as a quantifier, specifying how much, "When Lucinda dropped her ice cream cone on Harry Beard's head, he didn't move a tittle."

History: Tittle entered Middle English as titel, originally a variant of title, from Latin titulus "label, title, inscription". In 1607 Francis Beaumont wrote in his play,The Woman Hater, "I'll quote him to a tittle," meaning precisely, without omitting so much as a tittle. The same Latin word developed into Spanish tilde "accent, tilde". Somewhere over the years that followed, "to a tittle" was apparently confused with the phrase, "cross all your Ts (and dot your Is)," which also referred to exactitude. Ultimately, "to a tittle" was reduced to "to a T", which is how that odd expression wriggled its way into English. When we describe something to a T, we describe it absolutely exactly, down to the very last tittle.

Not one iota! Well, maybe a jot.

iota / ai-o-dê / noun

1. The ninth letter of the Greek alphabet, equivalent to a short [i].
2. A jot, a tittle, a wee bit, a very, very small amount.

Linguist Robert Beard: The name of the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet has become our word for the smallest imaginable thing in general. It sounds a bit odd in English, so it has not developed a derivational family. A rather odd abstract noun,iotacism, is occasionally used in referring to overpronunciation of the sound [i], such as the pronunciation of pen as [pin] down South or bed as [bid] in Australia and New Zealand.

This word is used in Matthew 5:18 of the New Testament: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot [iota] or one tittle shall in any wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled." The word is usually translated as jot in English but in the original Greek, it is iota. The use of the original iota is quite common in English today: "I will not retreat one iota from my opposition to putting new employees in cubicles."

Iota is the name of the ninth and smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. The letter's name is from Semitic, probably Hebrew yodh, Modern Hebrew yud, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, expressing the sound [y]. This word goes back to yodh, the tenth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, also the word for "hand". This suggests that the shape of the letter likely originated as an Egyptian hieroglyph of an arm. English also borrowed the French version of this word, jota, shortened it and Anglicized the pronunciation to jot.