Personal Blogs

A couple of days ago I was marking... and I suddenly wondered where the ✓ symbol came from. I had no idea of its origins.

There seem to be two main theories (perhaps we should call them theroids)

1. When something was correct people used to put V by it, short for Latin veritas, 'truth'. In time this became modified to ✓ for quicker and more fluent writing.

2. When something was correct people used to put ν by it, short for Greek νιke, Nike = 'victory'. The rest of the explanation is the same.

Both are open to doubt. I've not found (so far) any evidence about the earliest use of the tick to mean something is correct, and (as is still the case today) it seems to often been used just as a check mark, 'done that'.

And in some cultural traditions a tick means wrong, not right. Presumably this derives from marking the items that need correction.

More research is needed! Meanwhile we are told the Nike 'Swoosh' ™ is definitely not a ✓, even though Nike is named after the Greek goddess of victory (that'd be Nike). Hmmm.