Saturday, July 3, 2010

What's the origin of the word ditto?


Search
: ditto

Why
: Chandler says "dits."

Answer
: It comes from Rrrroman! It went like this:
  1. dictus, "having been said" (past participle of dicere, "to say")
  2. In Italian, dictus became detto
  3. In the Tuscan dialect, detto is ditto
In Italian, detto and ditto just mean "said." You can also use it to mean "the same as what has been said." For example, if you just said "22 December" (because you are Italian and that is how you say dates), and now you want to talk about "26 December," you can just say "26 detto" or "26 ditto." It's that easy.

The first recorded use of ditto in English was in 1625 in the "26 ditto" way. The way we use it to mean "copy" was first recorded in 1818. Foxy Beth Ditto was born Mary Beth Patterson in 1981.
Source: The Free Dictionary

The More You Know: The ditto mark (〃) is a typographic symbol indicating that the word(s) or figure(s) below which it is placed are to be repeated. For example:
Black pens, box of twenty ..... £2.10
Blue 〃 〃 〃 〃 ..... £2.10
You have probably written them as just regular quotation marks. Fool.
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