What do you think of this fact?
You type it hundreds of times a day without a second thought: the little dot over the i. Turns out it has its own name. It’s called a tittle.
A word with a long history
According to Wikipedia, a tittle is the dot over a lowercase i and j. The word comes from the Latin “titulus.” Merriam-Webster traces it back to the 12th century, when it meant any small point or sign used as a mark over a letter. It has a second meaning, too: a very small part of something.
The word got famous thanks to the King James Bible. Matthew 5:18 says that not “one jot or one tittle” shall pass from the law. Translation: not the tiniest bit.
What about German? There’s no special technical term, but there are two nice words for it. The Duden dictionary lists “i-Punkt” and “i-Tüpfelchen.” Germans mostly use the second one as a figure of speech, for the finishing touch that makes something perfect.
Why the i has a dot in the first place
The dot isn’t decoration. It’s a reading aid. In medieval manuscripts, especially in Gothic script, letters like i, m, n and u were built from identical vertical strokes called minims. A word like “minimum” turned into an unreadable picket fence.
A 13th-century Latin tongue twister that starts with “mimi numinum” takes this to the extreme. According to Wikipedia, this exact problem eventually led to the dotted i and to separate letters for j and v.
The j started out as just a variation of the i. According to Wikipedia, the two weren’t clearly told apart until the 16th century. The lowercase j still has its dot today.
In Turkish, the dot isn’t a detail. It’s essential: dotted i and dotless ı are two different letters with different sounds. A missing tittle there can change a word.