Who invented the long-d ditto?

Earlier I named and described the long-d ditto, a common practice in pen and ink business records.

The standard computer keyboard, and the conventions of digital writing, have brought several punctuation marks into common use.

@ and # are most obvious. Oddly, both were essentially obsolete, a vestige of quaint business usage along with pr, ea, bbl, the long-d ditto, or “Yrs of the 14th ult to hand”. @ was starting to disappear from typewriters in the ’70s, and nobody missed it.

I was surprised that no examples of the long-d ditto appear online. It was a very common trick for several centuries, not only in ledgers but in all sorts of tabulated lists. Maybe there’s a proper name that would yield better search results, but I doubt it. As a ‘public service’ to remedy this lack, I’ve crudely assembled an example from a printed ledger in an old bookkeeping magazine.

Here’s the printed version. Note the repetitive “do for ditto in the description column.

A more common practice in a handwritten ledger was to pull the ascender part of the d down across the rows. This was still common in the ’70s. Not a good representation because it’s part hand and part printed, but maybe it gets the idea across.

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Historian Sherri Olson gives what may be the first example of the device, in a slightly different context. It’s certainly the first time I’ve seen it mentioned in print!

= = = = = START OLSON:

The fact that large numbers of people were committing the same type of trespass in the same place led the scribe for the court roll of 1360 to experiment with abbreviating its format: instead of a running text stating a particular instance of trespass followed by the citations, he lists names in columns, joins them with a line, and enters a single notice: “For trespass in le Snape with horses.”

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