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I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''i'' (pronounced ), plural ''
ies The initialism IES may refer to: Government organizations * Indian Economic Service * Indian Education Service, in British India * Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the European Commission * Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S ...
''.


History

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative () in
Egyptian Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...
, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") 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 The Old Italic scripts are a family of similar ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which ...
. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), 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 ('I', ' İ') and lowercase (' ı', 'i') forms.


Use in writing systems


English

In Modern English spelling, represents several different sounds, either the diphthong ("long" ) 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 Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent traditionally regarded as the Standard language, standard and most Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been ...
. 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, .


Other uses

The Roman numeral I represents the number 1. In mathematics, a lowercase "" is used to represent the
unit imaginary number The imaginary unit or unit imaginary number () is a solution to the quadratic equation x^2+1=0. Although there is no real number with this property, can be used to extend the real numbers to what are called complex numbers, using addition and ...
, while an uppercase "" serves to denote an
identity matrix In linear algebra, the identity matrix of size n is the n\times n square matrix with ones on the main diagonal and zeros elsewhere. Terminology and notation The identity matrix is often denoted by I_n, or simply by I if the size is immaterial o ...
.


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 ( 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 (İi) and dotless (Iı). 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

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


Other representations


Related characters


Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

*I with
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s: Ị ị Ĭ ĭ Î î Ǐ ǐ Ɨ ɨ Ï ï Ḯ ḯ Í í Ì ì Ȉ ȉ Į į Į́ Į̃ Ī ī Ī̀ ī̀
In typesetting, the hook or tail is a diacritic mark attached to letters in many alphabets. In shape it looks like a hook and it can be attached below as a descender, on top as an ascender and sometimes to the side. The orientation of the hoo ...
Ỉ ỉ Ȋ ȋ Ĩ ĩ Ḭ ḭ
Unicode has subscript and superscript, subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, Chemical equation, chemical and certain other equations to be ...
*İ i and I ı : Latin letters dotted and dotless I *
IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...
-specific symbols related to I: *The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses various forms of the letter I: ** ** ** ** *Other variations used in phonetic transcription:
The close central unrounded vowel, or high central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , namely the lower-case letter ''i'' with a hori ...
Unicode has subscript and superscript, subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, Chemical equation, chemical and certain other equations to be ...
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any ...
𝼚 *i : Superscript small i is used for Computer terminal graphics *Ꞽ ꞽ : Glottal I, used for Egyptological yod *Ɪ ɪ : Small capital I *ꟾ :
Long I Long i ( la, i longum or '' itterai longa''), written , is a variant of the letter i found in ancient and early medieval forms of the Latin script. History In inscriptions dating to the early Roman Empire, it is used frequently but inconsisten ...
*ꟷ :
Sideways I The Sideways I ꟷ is an epigraphic variant of Latin capital letter I used in early medieval Celtic inscriptions from Wales and southwest England (Cornwall and Devon). About 36 monumental inscriptions in Wales, and about 15 in Cornwall and Dev ...


Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

* :
Semitic Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a name used since the 1770s to refer to the language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta. Semitic may also refer to: Religions * Abrahamic religions ** ...
letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive **Ι ι: Greek letter Iota, from which the following letters derive *** :
Coptic Coptic may refer to: Afro-Asia * Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya * Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century * Coptic alphabet ...
letter Yota ***І і :
Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...
letter soft-dotted I ***𐌉 : Old Italic I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I **** : Runic letter isaz, which probably derives from old Italic I *** :
Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
letter iiz


See also

* Tittle


References


External links

* * {{Latin script, I} ISO basic Latin letters Vowel letters