I

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ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
v t e

I, or i, is the ninth

Name

In English, the name of the letter is the "long I" sound, pronounced

History

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Phoenician Yodh	Western Greek Iota	Etruscan I	Latin I

In the

The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. The uppercase I does not have a dot while the lowercase i does in most Latin-derived alphabets. The dot can be considered optional, and is usually removed when applying other diacritics. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted and dotless. In Turkish, dotted İ and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms.

The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs (

The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in the English language.^[3]

The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced /aɪ/ 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 didn't 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

In many languages' orthographies, ⟨i⟩ is used to represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely, /ɪ/.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨i⟩ represents the close front unrounded vowel. The small caps ⟨ɪ⟩ represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel.

Other uses

• The
  1.^[5][6]
• In mathematics, a lowercase "i" is used to represent the
  unit imaginary number,^[7] while an uppercase "I" serves to denote an identity matrix.^[8]

• I with
  ᶤ^[9]
• İ i and I ı : Latin letters dotted and dotless I
• IPA-specific symbols related to I: ɪ ɨ
• The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses various forms of the letter I:^[10]
  • U+1D35 ᴵ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL I
  • U+1D62 ᵢ LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER I
  • U+1D09 ᴉ LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED I
  • U+1D4E ᵎ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TURNED I
• Other variations used in phonetic transcription:
  ᶧ^[9] 𝼚^[11][12]
• ⁱ : Superscript small i is used for computer terminal graphics^[13]
• Ꞽ ꞽ : Glottal I, used for Egyptological yod^[14]
• Ɪ ɪ : Small capital I
• ꟾ : Long I
• ꟷ : Sideways I

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤉 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive
  • Ι ι: Greek letter Iota, from which the following letters derive
    • Ⲓ ⲓ :
      Coptic
      letter Yota
    • І і :
      soft-dotted I
    • 𐌉 :
      Old Italic
      I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I
      • ᛁ : Runic letter isaz, which probably derives from old Italic I
    • 𐌹 : Gothic letter iiz

Other representations

Computing

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

Other

NATO phonetic	Morse code
India	▄ ▄ ⓘ

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling )	Braille dots-24 Unified English Braille

See also

• Tittle

References

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "I".

• Media related to I at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of I at Wiktionary