I, or i, is the ninth letter and third vowel of the modern English alphabet and the basic Latin ISO alphabet. Its English name is i (pronounced / ˈaɪ /), plural ies.

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have come from a arm hieroglyph, which is a pharyngeal fricative pronounced (/ ʕ /) in Egyptian, but was reassigned / j / (as in English “yes”) by the Semites, the word “arm” began with this sound. This letter can also be used to represent / i /, the rounded vowel in front, especially in foreign words.

The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (⟨Ι, ι⟩) to represent / i /, as in the ancient Italic alphabet. Latin (as in Modern Greek) it was also used to represent / j /, and this use continues in languages ​​derived from Latin. The modern letter “j” was born as a variation of “i,” and the two were used interchangeably for both vowel and consonant, differing only in the sixteenth century. The dot above the lower case letter “i” is sometimes called a title. In the Turkish alphabet,dotted and dotless I am considered to be separate letters, representing the front and back vowels, respectively, and both have uppercase (“I,” “İ”) and lowercase (ı, “i”) forms.

English

In Modern English spelling, ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong / aɪ / (“long” ⟨i⟩) as in a kite, the short / ɪ / as in bill, or ⟩ee⟩ the sound / iː / in the last syllable of machine. The diphthong / aɪ / developed from Middle English / iː / through a series of vowel changes. In the Great Vowel Change, Middle English / iː / changes into Early Modern English / ei /, which later changes into / əi / and eventually into the Modern English diphthong / aɪ / into the All-American and derived Pronunciation. Because the diphthong / aɪ / evolved from a long Middle English vowel, in traditional English grammar, it is called “long” ⟨i⟩.

The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in English.

The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is “I”, pronounced / aɪ / and always written in capital letters. This pattern appears for the same reason that lowercase letters ⟩i⟩ receive a dot: so it wouldn’t get lost in manuscripts before the printing era:

The capital letter “I” first appeared around 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

However, Chambers notes that the capitalized form did not take hold in the south of England “until the 1700s (although it appeared sporadically before that time).

Chambers explains that the capitalization of the pronoun makes it more distinct, thus avoiding “misreading the manuscripts.”

In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase letter I, “I” may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter, L, “l,” the vertical bar symbol “|” or the number “1”. In serifed typefaces, the uppercase letter form has both a baseline and a cap-height serif, while the lowercase letter L usually has an ascending baseline and a serif.

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