Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol first used in old Cyrillic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "τίτλος", "title" (compare dated English tittle, see tilde). The titlo still appears in inscriptions on modern icons and in service books printed in Church Slavonic.
The titlo is drawn as a zigzag line over a text. The usual form is short stroke up, falling slanted line, short stroke up; an alternative is like a sideways square bracket: short stroke up, horizontal line, short stroke down. It has several meanings depending on the context.
One was to mark letters when they are used as numerals. This is a quasi-decimal system similar to Greek numerals.
It is also used as an over-text abbreviation mark commonly used for words of importance, such as Tsar (Цесарь → Црь), Her Majesty (Государыня → Гня), God's Mother (Богородица → Бца), Jesus Christ (Иисус Христос → Ис Хс), God (Богъ → Бъ), Lord, as applied to God (Господь → Гь, see Fig. 2), etc. This corresponds to the Nomina sacra (Latin: "Sacred names") tradition of using contractions for certain frequently occurring names in Greek Scriptures.
In manuscripts, the titlo was often used to mark the place where a scribe accidentally skipped the letter, if there was no space to draw the missed letter above.
A short titlo is used over a single letter or over the place of abbreviation; a long titlo is used over the whole word.
Titlo is encoded in Unicode as COMBINING CYRILLIC TITLO ( ).
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Last updated on Thursday July 03, 2008 at 22:27:13 PDT (GMT -0700)
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