dot

Pluraldots

Formsdots, dotting, dotted

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A small, round spot or mark on a surface.

   He placed a single dot above each letter.

   From the plane, the cars looked like dots on the road.

   Similarspot, speck

   Note

   Every other sense grows from this one, though the roots point somewhere unexpected. Old English dott meant 'a point', but the Germanic word behind it meant 'wisp', and its cousins still mean clumps: Dutch dot 'lump, knot', dialectal Swedish dott 'a little heap'. A dot is often what something becomes at a distance, as when Tennyson's hull 'Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn'.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A punctuation mark used to indicate the end of a sentence or an abbreviation; a period or full stop.

   He typed the last word and ended it with a dot.

   Each abbreviation in the list closes with a dot.

   Similarperiod, point

   Note

   Here the mark is named for its shape rather than its job. Americans call it a period and British speakers a full stop, and both names describe what it does at the end of a sentence. Dot names the mark itself, which is why it fits the abbreviation too, where nothing is being stopped. Point is another general name for the same mark.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A small mark serving various purposes, including as a decimal separator, a multiplication sign, or an indication of the scalar product of two vectors.

   Place a dot between the two vectors to denote their scalar product.

   The dot in 3.14 separates the whole number from the decimal.

   Similarpoint

   Note

   In mathematics one small mark does several jobs. Between digits it is usually called the decimal point, and it separates the whole number from the fraction. Between two vectors it signals the scalar product, and spoken aloud that use becomes the spoken operator: 'F dot Δx'. Which job the mark is doing depends entirely on what stands on either side of it.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   Something very small by comparison; a tiny portion or speck.

   The far-off ship was no more than a dot on the horizon.

   Her hometown is a mere dot on the national map.

   Similarbit, crumb, grain, atom, hint

   Note

   Here the word becomes a measure of smallness. Its liveliest construction is 'a dot of a child', in which the noun after of is the thing that is small, so the whole phrase describes a tiny person. Its neighbors in meaning range from dab and ounce, for a small amount, to the nursery word itsy-bitsy.

   She was a dot of a child, barely tall enough to see over the counter.

   A dot of a dog trotted at his heels.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To mark something using dots or small spots.

   Artists sometimes dot the canvas to build up color gradually.

   She likes to dot her margins with tiny reminder marks.

   Similarstipple, mark, dab, spot

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To mark or vary a surface by scattering small, separate objects across it.

   Wildflowers dot the meadow every spring.

   Tiny villages dot the valley below the mountains.

   Similarpepper, speckle, stud, fleck, spangle

   Note

   Here the spots are things such as cottages, villages and crosses, and the verb works in two directions. Someone can dot a landscape with cottages. More often, though, the scattered things become the subject: wooden crosses 'dot a darkened stage' in Rosyln Sulcas's 2023 review. A guide to British villages has cottages 'dotted across the slopes', where across replaces with.

7. 7
   verbtransitive

   To cover a surface with small spots of some liquid.

   He dotted the canvas with drops of bright paint.

   Light rain will dot the windshield within minutes.

   Similarspot, speckle, fleck, spatter, sprinkle

   Note

   The passive is this sense's natural home, with the spots introduced by with: a jacket dotted with splashes of paint. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) gives Nurse Cramer a complexion 'dotted with fetching sprays of adorable freckles'. That line shows the meaning stretching beyond liquid to any small marks across a surface. Once the spots become villages, the meaning has moved to the scattered-objects sense.

8. 8
   verbtransitive

   To add a dot or dots to a written letter or character.

   Remember to dot each i before handing in the form.

   He carefully dotted every i in his signature.

   Note

   One idiom keeps this sense busy: dot your i's and cross your t's, an instruction to finish every small detail. The practical question is how to write the plurals. Lowercase letters are clearer with an apostrophe, because 'is' without one reads as the verb.

9. 9
   nouncountable

   In Morse code, the shorter of the two signals, contrasted with the dash.

   The operator sent a dot followed by a long dash.

   Three dots in a row stand for the letter S.

   Similardit

   Oppositedash, dah

   Note

   Telegraphy runs on this short signal and its longer partner. Its spoken twin is dit, a name for how the signal sounds rather than how it is written. William Hamilton's 1838 report on Morse's telegraph describes the code as 'combinations of dots and of lines of different lengths'. In that description the long signal is still being described rather than named.

10. 10
    nouncountable

    A diacritic in the form of a small point, written above or below some Latin letters, as in Ȧ, Ạ, Ḅ, Ḃ, and Ċ.

    The transliteration places a dot beneath the consonant.

    Several Latin letters take a dot above them in scholarly editions.

    Similarpoint

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