A few days ago I talked about the letter “J” being the last letter added to the English Alphabet. The J sits right next to the I in our alphabet and those are the only two letters that have a diacritic dot. (A diacritical dot, or mark is a mark, point, or sign added or attached to a letter or character to distinguish it from another of similar form, to give it a particular phonetic value, to indicate stress, etc., as a cedilla, tilde, circumflex, or macron.)
A lot of languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, add specific accents to the letters or characters throughout their alphabet, but the English alphabet has only two letters, i and j. with such a mark.
I believe, technically, the dot over a lowercase i and j is called a tittle. Some people think the word comes from a combination of tiny and little.
Today the dot is just called a superscript dot. It was added to the letter i in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter (in written manuscripts) from adjacent vertical strokes in letters like u, m, and n. j is a variant of i that emerged and became a separate letter and it also inherited the superscript dot.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.” That means to be thorough. The phrase “to a T” originated as “to a tittle” and means something done exactly right. It originally referred to the tiny detail of a tittle, suggesting that every minor detail was correct.
So once again all those cool phrases like “dot your i’s and cross your t’s” and watch your p’s and q’s” have left out that so important letter J.
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