titl

The root titl comes from Latin titulus, which began as something very concrete: a placard or inscription. In ancient Rome a titulus was the written label set on a thing to say what it was — the notice nailed above a cross stating the crime, the inscription on a tomb, the heading written at the top of a document. At its core, titulus answers the question "what is this, and what is it called?"

From that one idea — a label that names and ranks — English drew a surprisingly wide family. The most direct descendant is title, and it kept all the original senses at once: the name of a book or film (its heading), an honorific rank (Sir, Doctor — a label of status), a legal claim of ownership (title to land, a title deed), and a championship (the heavyweight title — the label that says who is best). Every one of these is still, at bottom, a label that says what something is or who someone is.

Add the prefix en- ('to put into, to give') and you get entitle: literally 'to give a title to.' That splits into two living senses. One is bookish — to entitle a poem is to give it its heading (a book entitled 'Dune'). The other is about rights — to be entitled to something is to have the 'title,' the rightful claim, to it (entitled to a refund). From that rights sense grew the modern, critical adjective entitled, meaning someone who believes they deserve privileges they have not earned — acting as if they hold a title of status they never received.

Add sub- ('under, beneath') and you get subtitle: a secondary, lower title. In publishing it's the explanatory line under the main title. In film it leapt to a new meaning: the translated dialogue printed at the bottom of the screen — text literally placed under the picture. So the titl family runs from carved Roman placards to the captions running along the bottom of a movie, but the thread never breaks: it is always about a label that names, ranks, or claims.