1146. This week, we look at the history of Braille, from the tragic accident that inspired Louis Braille's six-dot system to the "War of the Dots"—a decades-long conflict over competing reading standards in the U.S. Then, we look at the origin of the phrase "pitch black," revealing how the intensifier "pitch" refers to an ancient, dark wood tar and how the word traces its roots back to Old English.
1146. This week, we look at the history of Braille, from the tragic accident that inspired Louis Braille's six-dot system to the "War of the Dots"—a decades-long conflict over competing reading standards in the U.S. Then, we look at the origin of the phrase "pitch black," revealing how the intensifier "pitch" refers to an ancient, dark wood tar and how the word traces its roots back to Old English.
The braille segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
The pitch black segment was run by Samantha Enslen who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her online at dragonflyeditorial.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to look at the history of braille, and then we'll look at why we say things are pitch black.
But first, if you got a gift card for the holidays or your New Year's resolution is to read more, I have a great offer for you! If you sign up for my Patreon, you'll get an amazing reading list of 100 books recommended by Grammar Girl guests, and we're also doing our special where you get one month free. You can cancel anytime and keep the book list, but of course, I hope you'll love what we're doing and stay, but either way you'll get all kinds of great benefits like ad-free podcasts, bonus podcasts, mini-crosswords, and more for a whole month while you decide. So look in the show notes or show description for the special sign-up links that will give you a whole month free plus that 100-book list.
This first segment is by Karen Lunde.
by Karen Lunde
If you look closely at the number pad on an ATM or the sign next to an elevator button, you’ll see them: tiny grids of raised dots. Most of us brush past them without a second thought, and few of us realize that they're the result of a need for independence, a sort of war over reading standards, and one teenage boy's genius.
World Braille Day is coming up on January 4, so let's look at the history!
The story begins with a tragic irony. Louis Braille was born in France in 1809. His father was a harness maker, and Louis loved playing in his workshop. When he was three years old, he was trying to punch a hole in a piece of leather with an awl — a sharp, pointed tool — when it slipped and injured his eye. The infection spread, and by the age of five, Louis was completely blind.
Years later, Louis would use a blunt version of the same tool, the awl, to punch the dots that would become the reading system visually impaired people still use today.
But first, as a student, he had to endure the standard education for blind students at the time: "raised letters." These were exactly what they sound like — standard alphabet letters embossed onto heavy paper. They were huge, expensive to print, and agonizingly slow to read. Worst of all, you couldn't write them yourself.
Young Louis was frustrated. He wanted to take notes, write diaries, and just … communicate. And then, when he was a teenager, Braille was inspired by a former soldier named Captain Charles Barbier.
If you’ve heard of the history of braille before, this is usually the part where it gets a little "Hollywood." The popular legend goes that Captain Barbier invented a system later called "night writing" to help Napoleon’s soldiers communicate silently in the trenches at night without lighting a lamp that would reveal their position to enemy snipers.
The "night writing" story may have been mythologized, though. It's one of a dozen forms of alternative writing found in an 1815 book — I won't try to pronounce the original French, but it translates to the unwieldy title: "Essay on various methods of French shorthand, containing twelve different writing styles, with one plate for each method."
It's likely Barbier originally designed his tactile writing system with visually impaired people in mind, and it was only later used by the military.
But whatever its origin, Barbier’s system had a fatal flaw. It was phonetic — based on sounds rather than spelling — and it used a cell of twelve dots.
Imagine trying to read a billboard while looking through a drinking straw. That was the problem with twelve dots. The cell was too tall to fit under a single fingertip. To read a letter, you had to slide your finger up and down, and by the time you processed the bottom dots, you might have forgotten the top ones.
This is where Louis Braille’s genius kicked in. He realized that for a tactile system to be as fast as sight, the brain needed to capture the whole character in an instant. The six-dot cell fits perfectly under the pad of a finger — you can feel the entire pattern all at once — and it changed reading from a scanning process to a recognizing process.
And here's where the "Hollywood" influence continues. There are stories of Braille confronting Barbier about the flaws in his system during Barbier's visit to his school, The Royal Institution for the Young Blind in Paris. But there's a problem with that dramatized version too: Barbier introduced his system to the school's director, Pignier, around 1821. But he didn't meet Braille until 1833, after Braille had published his own 6-dot code in 1829.
Incidentally, Braille's book was called "Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them." Seems like the French were all about long titles back then!
And here is a fun fact for you creative types: Louis was also a talented musician who played the cello and the organ. He didn't just want to read books; he wanted to read music. So, he built a musical notation system right into the code from the start.
Braille started out as a one-to-one transliteration of the French alphabet, but soon various abbreviations and even logograms were developed— those are signs or characters that represent a complete word or phrase. So the system became more like a shorthand than an alphabet proper.
Today, there are braille codes for well over a hundred languages.
You might think the world would instantly applaud a fifteen-year-old kid for solving a problem that adults had struggled with for centuries. But if you know anything about the history of innovation, you know what comes next: the resistance.
Many sighted teachers opposed braille. It looked like alien code. It felt subversive, and it gave blind students a way to communicate that sighted teachers couldn't read. At one point, a new director at Louis’s school reportedly burned braille books and confiscated the students’ styluses. But you can’t stop a good idea. The students began passing notes in braille in secret — the 19th-century equivalent of texting under the desk.
The controversy eventually crossed the ocean to the United States, sparking a decades-long conflict known as the "War of the Dots."
It wasn't just a battle between braille and print. It was a battle between competing dot systems. There was "New York Point," which used dots that were only two high but could be multiple dots wide. There was "Boston Line Type," which clung to the old raised letters. And then there was "American Braille," which was slightly different from the French version.
It was a mess. A blind person in New York might not be able to read a book printed in Boston. It took until 1932—more than a century after Louis poked those first dots — before the British and American authorities agreed on a shared English braille standard.
So, braille won the War of the Dots. But how does it actually work?
If you are a word nerd like me, this is the best part. Braille is more than a one-to-one swap where you trade an 'A' for a 'Dot 1.' It has its own linguistic layers.
There are two main "grades" of braille. Grade 1 is what you might expect: a direct transcription. If you want to write "cat," you make the sign for C, the sign for A, and the sign for T.
But braille books are bulky. The paper has to be thick to hold the raised dots, and the dots themselves take up space. A braille copy of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" spans 14 volumes and weighs more than 74 pounds.
To save space and increase reading speed, most avid readers use grade 2 braille, also known as "contracted braille," which functions almost like shorthand. In grade 2 braille, single letters can be used for words in the right context, and single symbols represent prefixes and suffixes like I-N-G or T-I-O-N.
In our modern world of smartphones, audiobooks, and screen readers, people often ask: "Is braille still necessary?" Why learn a complex tactile code when Siri or Alexa can just read the text to you?
The answer brings us back to the difference between information and literacy.
Listening is wonderful, but reading can have additional benefits. If you only ever listen to text, you miss out on the mechanics of language. You don't "see" how punctuation breaks up a sentence. You don't internalize the difference between homophones like "there" — T-H-E-R-E — and the possessive T-H-E-I-R or the contraction, they-apostrophe-R-E.
And this could have real-world stakes. Studies have consistently shown that braille literacy is directly tied to employment. It could just be a correlation, but the unemployment rate for the blind community can be high, and of those who are employed, 85 to 90 percent are braille readers, though the exact figures vary a bit by study.
Sadly, Louis Braille died at age 43 from tuberculosis, never knowing that the system he invented would be used around the world, but his inspiration opened a world of literacy to countless people. So this week, take notice of the dots you see in public places and give a thought to Louis Braille.
And as a final aside, Braille is capitalized when referring to the man, but in both AP style and Chicago style, it's lowercase when referring to the writing system.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
This next segment is by Samantha Enslen
By Samantha Enslen
If you’re a listener in the Northern Hemisphere, we recently passed winter solstice — the shortest day of the year. If you live there, solstice comes every year on December 21 or 22, the day when the path of the sun is the farthest south from that hemisphere. If you live in the other half of the world, it comes on June 20 or 21, when the sun is the farthest north from you.
Either way, that day has the least daylight and the longest night.
So if you're looking outside at night these days, especially if it’s cloudy, you might think to yourself that the sky is pitch black. Then, if you’re like me, you start wondering what “pitch” is, and if it’s really black, and where that phrase came from anyway.
Here’s the scoop.
Pitch is indeed a black — or very dark brown substance. It’s created from distilling wood tar or turpentine, and it’s been used for centuries to caulk the seams of ships and to waterproof other types of wood.
“Pitch” is an ancient word. It can be traced back to the classical Latin “pix,” and it’s probably even older than that, because it shares the same Indo-European root as the same word in ancient Greek. Its first use in English — at least, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary — dates all the way back to Old English. The phrase “black as pitch” appears later, in the 1300s, and the adjective “pitch black” appears yet later, in the 1500s. The spelling could also be "pick" — P-I-C-K — for example, a Scottish poem from that time describes the night as being “grim an’ ghastly an’ pick black.”
By the way, the verb “to pitch," as in to pitch a tent, sounds the same as the noun, and is spelled the same, but it has a different root, and it's probably related to the verb "to prick." Just a reminder that not all words that look the same have the same origin.
Long story short, something pitch black is intensely black or dark. Think of a piece of black velvet, held under the covers, in a darkened room. That captures the feeling of pitch blackness.
Enjoy your winter, everyone, and stay warm and safe.
Sources
Dent, Susie. Pitch. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.
Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition. Pitch (subscription required, accessed November 15, 2019).
Harper, Doug. pitch (v.1). Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed December 13, 2025).
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Pitch (subscription required, accessed December 13, 2025).
Ross, Alexander. The Fortunate Shepherdess: A Pastoral Tale; in Three Cantos, pp. 58, 1768.
That segment was run by Samantha Enslen who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her online at dragonflyeditorial.com.
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/what-does-pitch-black-mean/
And I actually remembered an old familect that fit too perfectly with this segment not to share again, so here's that from Josh:
Hi, Mignon, this is Josh calling from Israel, a long-time listener to the podcast. I just wanted to share with you a familect story. When my son was about three or four years old, he mistakenly understood the word "pitch" in the phrase "pitch black" to just be like an intensifier, meaning something along the lines of "extremely" or "very," and would say things like "pitch red" or "the soup is pitch hot." So we in the family thought it was adorable and understandable, and we just went with it. And we now use the term, the food could be pitch delicious or it could be pitch hot outside and the like. And that's just the way that a word, an adjective was misunderstood by a child and gave us a new way to intensify a noun.
Familects are words or phrases you use with your family that nobody else does. They are like your private language, and people have friendliects with their friends too. If you want to share the story of your familect or friendliect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or record a message on Speakpipe. You'll find both of those in the show notes.
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