A tufted titmouse, Baeolophus bicolor, with blue-gray, orange, and white coloring, perched on a branch with snow on its beak
14 December 2020
A titmouse is a kind of small songbird of the family Paridae, with a variety of genera and species that range throughout the northern hemisphere and Sub-Saharan Africa. The name is of interest here because it is an excellent example of how superficial resemblances can lead one astray when trying to determine a word’s origins, for neither the bird nor the word have anything to do with teats or with mice.
The word first appears in the early fourteenth century in Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth sur la Langue Française (Walter of Bibbeworth’s Treatise on the French Language), which is not so much a treatise as it is a poem. The English words are interlinear glosses of the Anglo-Norman French:
titomoze
Uncore avez le musenge,
thoursekes
Ki les haies u boys renge,
ther gurdel
Delacez, valet, toust ta renge,
Si renger volez le musenge.(Yet, you have the titmouse
That ranges among the hedges and woods,
Hastily untie your sword-belt, boy,
If you want to catch the titmouse.)
Titmouse is a compound of two roots. The origin of tit- here is likely an echoic coinage after the bird’s song or chirping. At about the same time that titomoze appears in Walter of Bibbesworth’s poem we see hints of the verb to tittle, meaning to whisper or spread gossip. I say hints because we don’t have attestation of verb itself until a bit later. But from 1275 we have a record of the surnames Richard le Titteler, Symon le Titteler, and Symon le Tuteler.
And we see tittler, meaning one who spreads gossip, in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the B-text of which was written c. 1380:
Enuye herfore hated conscience
And freres to philosofye he fonde hem to scole
The while coveytise and vnkyndenesse conscience assailled
In vnite holycherche conscience helde hym
And made pees porter to pynne þe ȝates
Of alle taletellers and tyterers [a]n ydel
Ypocrisye and he an hard saut þei made
Ypocrisey atte ȝate hard gan fiȝte
And wounded wel wykkedly many [a] wise techer
Þat with conscience acorded and cardinale vertues(Envy, therefore, hated Conscience
And brother to Philosophy he put him to scole
While Covetousness and Unkindness assailed Conscience
In solidarity Holy Church supported Conscience
And made Peace porter to fasten the gates
From all tale tellers and titterers in vain
Hypocrisy and they, they made a hard assault
Hypocrisy at the gate made a hard fight
And cruelly severely wounded many a wise teacher
Who agreed with Conscience and cardinal virtues.)
The verb to tittle is finally attested to in the play Mankind, which dates to 1465–70. The play features a demon named Titivillus whose mission to take down the names of those who whisper and gossip or mumble and mispronounce the Latin during mass. At one point in the play, Titivillus induces the title character Mankind to leave off his prayer and answer the call of nature by tittling in his ear:
I promise yow I have no lede on my helys.
I am here ageyn to make þis felow yrke.
Qwyst! pesse! I xall go to hys ere and tittle þerin.
A schorte preyer thyrlyth Hewyn: of þi preyere blyn.
Aryse and avent þe[e], nature commpellys!(I promise you I have no lead in my heels.
I am here again to make this fellow weary.
Quiet! Hush! I shall go to his ear and tittle therein:
“A short prayer pierces Heaven: of your prayer, cease.
Arise and relieve yourself, nature calls!”)
An alternative explanation that is often offered is that tit here refers to something of small size. And tit has been used in English to mean a small horse or a small person, and the Icelandic tittur means a runt and tita the tip of a horn, but these are all later developments, sixteenth century or later.
It is also tempting to relate titmouse to the words petit or petite. If one goes by the modern spelling, these might seem to be good candidates, but etymology is about pronunciation, not spelling, and these suggestions are essentially phonologically impossible. To come from petit would require the dropping of the stressed syllable and the addition of a final /t/, neither one of which is likely, and to have both occur in the same word is almost unthinkable. Petite, with the shift in stress and the final /t/, dodges these objections, but this word is a modern borrowing from French, centuries after titmouse is recorded. Plus, there is nothing in record resembling petitmouse.
The second element of titmouse is older. It comes from the Old English masæ, the name for the bird. It appears three times in the Old English Corpus, all of them Old English–Latin glossaries, in which masæ glosses the Latin word for the bird, parula.
The Old English word comes from a common Germanic root that meant the songbird. Cognates in present-day languages are the German Meise, Danish mejsen, Dutch mees, Norwegian meis, Swedish mes, as well as the French mésange. The French word comes out of the Norman dialect, musenge (seen above). Norman French was heavily influenced by Old Norse because the region was heavily settled by Danes. Norman, after all, is just a variation on Norseman.
The shift of masæ or moze to mouse is a result of the Great Vowel Shift in the sixteenth century. In this case the vowel /u:/ changed to /aʊ/. And since it was pronounced the same as mouse, the spelling of titmouse soon followed.
So, a titmouse is a chirping songbird. It makes perfect sense once you know the history.
Sources:
Burrow, John A. and Thorlac Turville–Petre. Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype. Raleigh, North Carolina: Seenet, 2018, lines 20.295–304, 371–72.
Hessels, J.H., ed. An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 89. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Mankind.” Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Greg Walker, ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000, lines 556–61, 271.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. tit-mose, n., titiller, n.
Owen, Annie, ed. Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth sur la Langue Française (Walter of Bibbeworth’s Treatise on the French Language). Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977, lines 759–62, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Cambridge, University Library Gg.1.1).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. titmouse, n., tittler, n.1; January 2018, s.v. tit, n.4; December 2002, s.v. mose, n.
Pheifer, J.D., ed. Old English Glosses in the Épinal–Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Reaney, P.H. and R.M. Wilson, eds. A Dictionary of British Surnames, second edition with corrections and additions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, 350. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Jocelyn Anderson, 17 December 2016, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.