I


I or i is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is i, plural ies.

History

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 by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.
The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota to represent, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin, it was also used to represent 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. 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 and lowercase forms.

Use in writing systems

English

In Modern English spelling, represents several different sounds, either the diphthong as in kite, the short as in bill, or the sound in the last syllable of machine. The diphthong developed from Middle English through a series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English changed to Early Modern English, which later changed to and finally to the Modern English diphthong in General American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" in traditional English grammar.
The letter is the fifth most common letter in the English language.
The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing:

Other languages

In many languages' orthographies, is used to represent the sound or, more rarely,.
LanguagePronunciation in IPANotes
FrenchSee French orthography.
German,, See German orthography.
ItalianPronounced as long in stressed and open syllables, when in a closed stressed syllable or unstressed. See Italian orthography.

Other uses

The Roman numeral Ⅰ represents the number 1. In mathematics, the lowercase "" represents the unit imaginary number.

Forms and variants

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 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 and dotless.
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 ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'.

Computing codes

Other representations

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet