tittle /TI-təl/. noun and verb. A point or mark used as a diacritical. For example the dot atop the lowercase ‘i’. In early horn-books, a series of dots (⋰) indicating an omission. More generally, the smallest part. Also to whisper or gossip (see tittle-tattle). From Latin titulus (title, or in the medieval sense a stroke or accent).
“Time on the farm is the time of the wide world, neither a jot nor a tittle more or less, Resolutely I beat down the blind, subjective time of the heart, with its spurts of excitement and drags of tedium…” (J. M. Coetzee)
“His love was shown fitfully, and more in ways calculated to please himself than to please me. I felt that for no wish of mine would he deviate one tittle from any predetermined course of action.” (Elizabeth Gaskell)
“Some amusement was elicited in literary circles by the predicament of a woman who was delivered of a son old enough to be her father but it served to deflect Mr. Tracy not one tittle from his dispassionate quest for scientific truth. His acumen and pertinacity have, in fact, become legendary…” (Flann O’Brien)
“—But for heaven’s sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons —let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle; and some how or other, you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it—” (Laurence Sterne)
“It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time. I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it.” (Samuel Beckett)
“…there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.” (James Joyce)