tit

\ \ English has three separate words tit. The oldest, ‘breast’ [OE], belongs to a West Germanic family of terms for ‘breast’ or ‘nipple’ that also includes German zitze and Dutch tit: it presumably originated in imitation of a baby’s sucking sounds. From Germanic it was borrowed into the Romance languages, giving Italian tetta, Spanish teta, Romanian tata, and French tette. The Old French ancestor of this, tete, gave English teat [13], which gradually replaced tit as the ‘polite’ term. (Titillate [17] may be ultimately related). Tit the bird [18] is short for titmouse [14]. This in turn was formed from an earlier and now defunct tit, used in compounds denoting ‘small things’ and probably borrowed from a Scandinavian language, and Middle English mose ‘titmouse’, which came from a prehistoric Germanic *maisōn (source also of German meise and Dutch mees ‘tit’). And the tit [16] of tit for tat (which produced British rhyming slang titfer ‘hat’ [20]) originally denoted a ‘light blow, tap’, and was presumably of onomatopoeic origin. (The tit- of titbit [17], incidentally, is probably a different word. It was originally tid- – as it still is in American English – and it may go back ultimately to Old English tiddre ‘frail’.)

\ \ Cf.⇒ TEAT, TITILLATE; TITMOUSE