| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| ditto |
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| SYLLABICATION: | dit·to |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  d t  |
| NOUN: | Inflected forms: pl. dit·tos
1. The same as stated above or before. 2. A duplicate; a copy. 3. A pair of small marks (  ) used to indicated that the word, phrase, or figure given above is to be repeated. | | ADVERB: | As before. | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: dit·toed, dit·to·ing, dit·tos
To duplicate (a document, for example). | | ETYMOLOGY: | Italian dialectal, past participle of Italian dire, to say, from Latin d cere. See deik- in Appendix I. | | WORD HISTORY: | Ditto, which at first glance seems a handy and insignificant sort of word, actually has a Roman past, for it comes from dictus, “having been said,” the past participle of the verb dcere, “to say.” In Italian dcere became dire and dictus became detto, or in the Tuscan dialect ditto. Italian detto or ditto meant what said does in English, as in the locution “the said story.” Thus the word could be used in certain constructions to mean “the same as what has been said”; for example, having given the date December 22, one could use 26 detto or ditto for 26 December. The first recorded use of ditto in English occurs in such a construction in 1625. The sense “copy” is an English development, first recorded in 1818. Ditto has even become a trademark for a duplicating machine.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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