I

Not to be confused with I (Pronoun).

For other uses of "I", see I (disambiguation).

Due to technical restrictions, ı, the lowercase dotless i, redirects here.

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

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

History

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Phoenician yodh	Etruscan I Ii	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/. 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 upper-case (⟨I⟩, ⟨İ⟩) and lowercase (⟨ı⟩, ⟨i⟩) forms.

In modern English, ⟨i⟩ represents 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.

Usage

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

Form

In some fonts, the upper case letter I ⟨I⟩ may be difficult to distinguish from the lower case letter L ⟨l⟩, the vertical bar character ⟨|⟩, or the digit one ⟨1⟩.

Some people write uppercase I with three strokes, with two horizontal bars at the top and bottom (as in Comic Sans MS). Others write it with only one vertical stroke (as in Arial).

Related letters and other similar characters

• İ i and I ı : dotted and dotless I
• І і : Cyrillic letter Dotted I
• И и : Cyrillic letter I

Computing codes

character	I		i
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I		LATIN SMALL LETTER I
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	73	0049	105	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 and all 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

External links

• Media related to I at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for I
• The Wiktionary entry for i

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
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646