![]() Here’s the citation, from a 1625 collection of travel writing by the English cleric Samuel Purchas: “The eight and twentieth ditto, I went … to the Generals Tent.” In the dictionary’s earliest English example of the usage, “ditto” appears in the date sense and means “in or of the month already named said month.” And the phrase il detto libro would have meant “the said book.” In an Italian sentence, the OED explains, “December 22” and “December 26” might have been written as 22 di dicembre and 26 detto. We wrote briefly in 2007 about the history of the word “ditto,” but your question gives us a chance to expand on our original post.Įnglish borrowed the word “ditto” in the early 1600s from Italian, where detto ( ditto in the Tuscan dialect) was the past participle of dire (to say).Īt the time, the Oxford English Dictionary says, detto was used adjectivally in the sense of “aforesaid” to modify dates in Italian “to avoid repetition of the name of a month.” ![]() ![]() ![]() And Xerox wasn’t even responsible for the use of “ditto” in the copy-machine sense. Q: In The Pioneers, a book from Time-Life’s The Old West series, a pioneer woman uses “ditto” to mean something like “I agree with what you just said.” I thought the term had its origins in the Xerox copy machine, which created “dittos” of documents.Ī: No, the word “ditto” had been around for hundreds of years before Xerox made its first copying machine in the mid-20th century. ![]()
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