A novel spectrophotometric method for the determination of titanium(IV) by using a new reagent, water extract of slippery elm leaf is developed. In 0.05 M hydrochloric acid, titanium(IV) reacts with this reagent to form a yellow product. The formed product shows maximum absorbance at 415 nm with a molar absorptivity value of 0.68×104 l mol–1 cm–1 and the method was linear in the 0.2–6 µg ml−1 concentration range. The detection limit value was found to be 0.0131 µg ml−1. The proposed method was simple, low cost, selective, and sensitive. It was applied to the analytic samples with satisfactory results.