I

Not to be confused with palochka.

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For the pronoun, see I (pronoun). For other uses, see I (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, "ı" redirects here. For the lowercase dotless i, see Dotted and dotless I.

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

Cursive script 'i' and capital 'I'

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

History

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Phoenician Yodh	Etruscan I	Greek Iota

In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/) 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 (〈Ι, ι〉) 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' was firstly 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. 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', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms.

In modern English, 'i' represents several different sounds, either a "long" diphthong /aɪ/ as in kite, which developed from Middle English /iː/ after the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, or the "short" /ɪ/ as in bill.

Use in English

In English orthography, the letter 'i' has a "long" and "short" sound like the other vowel letters as a result of the Great Vowel Shift: "long" 'i' has the sound /aɪ/ and "short" 'i' has the sound /ɪ/. The letter 'i' may also take the sound /iː/ in loanwords from other languages. Some digraphs that include 'i' are ai, oi, ei, ui and ie.

The letter 'i' is the fifth most common letter in the English language.

Use in other languages

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

Other Usage

It is also used in math to denote the imaginary unit $i$.

Forms and variants

See also: History of the Latin alphabet and Dotted and dotless I

In some san 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 has generally a hooked ascender and a baseline serif.

The uppercase I does not have a dot (tittle) while the lowercase i has one in the most of Latin-based alphabet schemes. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I's: the dotted one (İi) and the dotless one (Iı).

The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, which are one with crossbars () and without crossbars (). Usually, they are considered the same, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems such as the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet. In the system, the former is the uppercase counterpart of ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'.

Computing codes

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
ASCII 1	73	49	105	69

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

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
India	··

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

See also

• Tittle
• Imaginary unit

Related letters and other similar characters

• İ i and I ı : Latin dotted and dotless letter i
• І і : Cyrillic soft-dotted letter i
• И и : Cyrillic letter i
• י : Hebrew letter Yodh

External links

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

The 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
Letter I with diacritics
Í í	Ì ì	Ĭ ĭ	Î î	Ǐ ǐ	Ïï	Ḯḯ	Ĩĩ	Į į	Ī ī	Ỉ ỉ	Ȉ ȉ	Ȋ ȋ	Ị ị	Ḭ ḭ	Ɨ ɨ	ᵻ	ᶖ	İ i	I ı	ꟾ
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 List of letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode