"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 10/11/17 (ditto)

I'm going to start with the origin of ditto, because we use ditto quite a lot when we want to echo someone's feeling or thoughts, or where we want to aviod repeating the same word - s oto aviod repetition. But where does it actually come from? We have to look back to 17th-century Italian, when ditto meant "in the aforesaid month". So it was used to avoid repeating a month. So quite a specialist sense. But English merchants picked it up and started used it in accounts ans lists. And actually 18th-century tailors picked it up as well, and it was shorthand for "the same material". So "sute of dittos" was a sute that was the same material and the same colour throughout. And that was a standard term in the clothing trade. But before we had the ditto marks that we know today, those double apostrophes, the word ditto was used itself. So that would be what was read out if they were repeating something that was written down. And only fairly recently did it settle on, as I say, those double aphostrophe marks. But where does ditto itself comes from? It's a Tuscan dialect word, "detto" - "I said", which ultimately goes back to the Latin dictus, and of course dictus gave us a diction, dictum, dictation and, of course, dictionary, as well.