Ditto mark


The ditto mark is a typographic symbol indicating that the word or figure above it are to be repeated. The mark may be made using a pair of apostrophes, a quotation mark, or the equivalent mark from Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all of which are visually similar.
For example:
In English, the abbreviation is sometimes used.

History

Early evidence of ditto marks can be seen on a cuneiform tablet of the Neo-Assyrian period where two vertical marks are used in a table of synonyms to repeat text.
In China the corresponding historical mark was two horizontal lines , found in bronze script from the Zhou Dynasty, as in the example at right. In script form this became, and is now written as ; see iteration mark.
The word comes from the Tuscan language, where it is the past participle of the verb dire, with the meaning of "said", as in the locution "the said story". The first recorded use of ditto with this meaning in English occurs in 1625.

Other languages

For Chinese, Japanese and Korean, there is also a Unicode character in the range CJK Symbols and Punctuation. The equivalent symbol used in French,, is called a guillemet itératif.