Other forms: dots, dotted, doting, dotting, doted
A dot is a tiny round mark. A dot on the map, join the dots, a red dot.
In addresses and file names it is what the full stop is called: dot com, dot org — which is why the whole industry was called the dot-com boom. On the dot means exactly on time. Dot to dot is the children's puzzle, and join the dots also means to work out how facts connect. Note polka dot, the pattern; dotted line, which you sign on; and Morse code's dots and dashes.
1noundotA tiny round mark.
“There is a dot on the screen that will not go away.”
2verbscatterTo scatter things about a place.
“Small farms are dotted right across the valley.”
dot is a small mark.
Also accepted in games: point, spot
Old English dott meant the head of a boil, and the word disappeared for about six hundred years before reappearing in the sixteenth century meaning a small mark. Nobody has explained the gap.
Proto-Germanic
*duttaz — wisp
Proto-West Germanic
*dott
Old English
dott — a dot, point
Middle English
*dot
English, today
dot
From Middle English dot, dotte, from Old English dott (“a dot, point”), from Proto-West Germanic dott, from Proto-Germanic duttaz (“wisp”). Cognate with stq Dot, Dotte (“a clump”), Dutch dot (“lump, knot, clod”), Low German Dutte (“a plug”), dialectal Swedish dott (“a little heap, bunch, clump”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA