I

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This article is about the letter of the Latin alphabet. For the pronoun, see I (pronoun). For the mathematical
concept, see Imaginary unit. For the similar letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, see palochka. For other uses, see I
(disambiguation).

ISO basic
Latin alphabet

Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt
Uu Vv Ww Xx
Yy Zz

v
t
e

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 Writing cursive forms of I

I (named i /a/, plural ies)[1] is the ninth letter and the third vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Contents
[hide]

1History
2Use in writing systems
o 2.1English
o 2.2Other languages
3Other uses
4Forms and variants
5Computing codes
6Other representations
7Related characters
o 7.1Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
o 7.2Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
8See also
9References
10External links

History[edit]

Phoenician Etruscan Greek

Egyptian hieroglyph
Yodh I Iota

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced
pharyngeal fricative (//) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their
word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close front unrounded
vowel, mainly in foreign words.
The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (, ) to represent /i/, the same as in
the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in
the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter 'j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were
used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th
century.[2] The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless
I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase
('I', '') and lowercase ('', 'i') forms.

Use in writing systems[edit]

Pronunciation of the name of the letter i in European languages

English[edit]
In Modern English spelling, i represents several different sounds, either the diphthong /a/ ("long" i) as
in kite, the short // as in bill, or the ee sound /i/ in the last syllable of machine. The diphthong /a/ developed
from Middle English /i/ through a series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English /i/ changed
to Early Modern English /ei/, which later changed to /i/ and finally to the Modern English
diphthong /a/ in General American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong /a/ developed from a
Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" i in traditional English grammar.[citation needed]
The letter, i, is the fifth most common letter in the English language.[3]
The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced /a/ and always written with a capital
letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase i acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost
in manuscripts before the age of printing:
The capitalized I first showed up about 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to
the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.
Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didnt become established in the south of England until
the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time).
Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus avoiding misreading handwritten
manuscripts.[4]

Other languages[edit]
In many languages' orthographies, i is used to represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely, //.

Pronunciation in
Language Notes
IPA

French /i/ See French orthography.

 German //, /i/, /i/ See German orthography.

Pronounced as long [i] in stressed and open syllables, [i] when in a closed
Italian /i/
stressed syllable or unstressed. See Italian orthography.

Other uses[edit]
The Roman numeral represents the number 1.[5][6] In mathematics, the lowercase "i" represents the unit
imaginary number.

Forms and variants[edit]

See also: History of the Latin alphabet and Dotted and dotless I
In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase letter I, 'I' may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter
L, 'l', the vertical bar character '|', or the digit one '1'. In serifed typefaces, the capital form of the letter has both
a baseline and a cap-height serif, while the lowercase L generally has a hooked ascender and a baseline serif.
The uppercase I does not have a dot (tittle) while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived alphabets.
However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted (i) and dotless (I).
The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs ( ) and without serifs ( ). Usually these are considered
equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the
African reference alphabet. In that system, the former is the uppercase counterpart of and the latter is the
counterpart of 'i'.

Computing codes[edit]

Character I i

Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I LATIN SMALL LETTER I

Encodings decimal hex decimal hex

Unicode 73 U+0049 105 U+0069

UTF-8 73 49 105 69

Numeric character reference I I i i

EBCDIC family 201 C9 137 89

ASCII1 73 49 105 69

1
Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families
of encodings

Other representations[edit]
NATO phonetic Morse code

India

Braille
Signal flag Flag semaphore
dots-24

Related characters[edit]
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet[edit]

I with diacritics:
i and I : Latin dotted and dotless letter i
IPA-specific symbols related to I:
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets[edit]

: Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive
: Greek letter Iota, from which the following letters derive
: Coptic letter Yota
: Cyrillic letter soft-dotted I
: Old Italic I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I
: Runic letter isaz, which probably derives from old Italic I
: Gothic letter iiz

See also[edit]
I (disambiguation)
Tittle

References[edit]
 1. Jump up^ Brown & Kiddle (1870) The institutes of English grammar, p. 19.
Ies is the plural of the English name of the letter; the plural of the letter itself is rendered I's, Is, i's, or is.
2. Jump up^ "The Latin Alphabet". du.edu.
3. Jump up^ "Frequency Table". cornell.edu. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
4. Jump up^ OConner, Patricia T.; Kellerman, Stewart (2011-08-10). "Is capitalizing "I" an ego
thing?". Grammarphobia. Retrieved 23 December 2014.
5. Jump up^ Gordon, Arthur E. (1983). Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy. University of California
Press. p. 44. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
6. Jump up^ King, David A. (2001). The Ciphers of the Monks. p. 282. In the course of
time, I, V and X became identical with three letters of the alphabet; originally, however, they bore no
relation to these letters.

External links[edit]
Wikisource has the text of
the 1911 Encyclopdia
Britannica article I.

Media related to I at Wikimedia Commons

The dictionary definition of I at Wiktionary

[hide]

Latin alphabet

History

Spread

Romanization

Roman numerals

et

Alphabet

Letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet

Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu
Letter I with diacritics

h

r sets

racters in Unicode

atics