There’s an unrelated, far earlier word that came to mean about the same thing in time, however incorrectly: “pi” (often “pie” in earlier days), which dates to 1659 in the OED. The proofreader says, “three dingbat stars,” meaning something like * * * being inserted between lines. The more graphical presentations meant more flourishes, signs, and symbols, but there wasn’t particular a name for them.īy 1917, a columnist for the Boston Sunday Post described a dust up with a proofreader, which includes him overhearing the proofreader read off layout instructions to a typesetter. By the late 1800s, newspapers more deeply intersected with the growth of advertising-driven commerce, which bled into a greater variety of symbols and signs to catch attention and occupy less space than spelled-out words. I expect it’s late that we see the term defined in print, because it would have been used informally in type shops long before reaching magazines. Also called, humorously, dingbats, flubdubs, etc. The First Steps in Job Composition (1918) uses the term quite crisply in its definition list:įlorets-Small ornaments generally, conventionalized leaves. The journal Postage: The Magazine of Direct Mail Advertising has a strange article in its January 1917 issue called “Dingbatting the Sermon the Mount,” which becomes clear when you see dingbats as tiny sketches used to illustrate a point. But I can find easily find references that predate it, which all cluster around 19, which makes me wonder if someone popularized it at the time. The Oxford English Dictionary only finds its first citation for this meaning in 1921 (in the OED’s 1993 supplement). The citation record is pretty unclear about when dingbats made its leap into the type case, covering typographic ornamentation that was always miscellaneous, and had become more so with the ease starting in the 1870s of creating more different characters of type (due to the pantograph, a mechanized tracing/cutting tool) and producing them (in the 1880s, with the start of hot-metal typesetting).
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