Dot

How to spell dot

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dot

What does dot mean?

1. nounA small round mark or spot.
2. verbTo scatter or mark something with small spots or points.

Dot in a sentence

• noun

  A single dot of ink had smudged the signature.

• verb

  Small farms dot the hills along the valley road.

• noun

  The map marked each office with a red dot.

• verb

  Streetlights dot the long stretch of motorway at night.

Where does dot come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word goes back to the Old English 'dott', which surprisingly meant the head of a boil or a small lump, not a printed mark at all. After that early use it almost vanished from the written record for several centuries, surfacing only rarely in Middle English. It re-emerged strongly in the late 1500s and 1600s with the now familiar sense of a tiny round spot or speck made with a pen. From there it spread naturally to the small marks in writing, such as the point over an 'i' or the full stop, and much later to telegraphy and computing, where 'dot' names the point in web and file addresses. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, its spelling is entirely regular and gives modern writers no real trouble.

How the word is built

• dot (a single small round mark); native monosyllable with no separable affixes