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

History

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Proto-Semitic Y	Phoenician yodh	Etruscan I Ii	Greek Iota

In Semitic, the letter was probably originally a pictogram for a leg with a hand, derived from a similar hieroglyphics 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 English language.

Computing codes

Alternative representations of I

NATO phonetic	Morse code
India	··

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode, the capital ‹I› is codepoint U+0049 and the lower case ‹i› is U+0069.

The ASCII code for capital ‹I› is 73 and for lowercase ‹i› is 105; or in binary 01001001 and 01101001, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital ‹l› is 201 and for lowercase ‹i› is 137.

The upper case "I" can look like a lower case "l" (L) or a "1" or the puncuation mark "|" or a line in some fonts.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "I" and "i" for upper and lower case, respectively.