Noun

(en noun)

Subject; theme; a category or general area of interest.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= The machine of a new soul , passage=The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure. Yet this is the level of organisation that does the actual thinking—and is, presumably, the seat of consciousness.}}

(Internet) Discussion thread.

(obsolete) An argument or reason.

* Bishop Wilkins

contumacious persons, who are not to be fixed by any principles, whom no topics can work upon

(obsolete, medicine) An external local application or remedy, such as a plaster, a blister, etc.

(Wiseman)

Noun

(en noun)

A small, insignificant amount (of something); a vanishing scintilla; a measly crumb; a minute speck.

Any small dot, stroke, or diacritical mark, especially if part of a letter, or if a letter-like abbreviation; in particular, the dots over the Latin letters (i) and (j).

* 1590 , Bales, The Arte of Brachygraphie (quoted in Daid King's 2001 'The Ciphers of the Monks'):

The foure pricks or tittles' are these. The first is a full prick or period. The second is a comma or crooked ' tittle .

* 1965 , P. A. Marijnen, The Encyclopedia of the Bible :

The words "jot" and "tittle " in this passage refer to diacritic marks, that is, dashes, dots, or commas added to a letter to accentuate the pronunciation.

* 1987 , Andrea van Arkel-De Leeuw van Weenen, Möðruvallabók, AM 132 Fol: Index and concordance , page xii:

*:: (the page calls both "a superscript sign (hooklike)" and also a diacritical abbreviation of ") "tittles" )

* 2008 , Roy Blount, Alphabet juice: the energies, gists, and spirits of letters :

A tittle' is more or less the same thing (the dot over an i, for instance), except that it can be traced back to Medieval Latin for a little mark over or under a letter, such as an accent ague or a cedilla. I don't know whether an umlaut is one or two '''tittles'''. Maybe it's a jot and a ' tittle side by side.