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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 Template:IPAc-en), plural ies.^[1]Template:Better source

In English, the name of the letter is the “long I” sound, pronounced Template:IPAc-en. In most other languages, its name matches the letter’s pronunciation in open syllables.

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative (Template:IPA) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to Template:IPA (as in English “yes”) by Semites because their word for “arm” began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent Template:IPA, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.

The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (Template:Angle bracket) to represent Template:IPA, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent Template:IPA 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.^[2]

In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase Template:Angbr 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 dot over the lowercase ‘i’ is sometimes called a tittle. The uppercase I does not have a dot, while the lowercase ‘i’ does in most Latin-derived alphabets. The dot can be considered optional and is usually removed when applying other diacritics. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted and dotless. In Turkish, dotted İ 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.

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’.

In Modern English spelling, Template:Angbr represents several different sounds, either the diphthong Template:IPAc-en (“long” Template:Angbr) as in kite, the short Template:IPAc-en as in bill, or the Template:Angbr sound Template:IPAc-en in the last syllable of machine. The diphthong Template:IPA developed from Middle English Template:IPA through a series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English Template:IPA changed to Early Modern English Template:IPA, which later changed to Template:IPA and finally to the Modern English diphthong Template:IPA in General American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong Template:IPA developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called “long” Template:Angbr in traditional English grammar.Template:Citation needed

The letter Template:Angbr is the fifth most common letter in the English language.^[3]

The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is “I”, pronounced Template:IPAc-en and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase Template:Angbr acquired a dot: so it wouldn’t get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing:

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In many languages’ orthographies, Template:Angbr is used to represent the sound Template:IPA or, more rarely, Template:IPA.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, Template:Angbr IPA represents the close front unrounded vowel. The small caps Template:Angbr IPA represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel.

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 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive:

• • Ι ι: Greek letter Iota, from which the following letters derive:

See also: Dotted and dotless I in computing

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

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1. ↑ Brown & Kiddle (1870) The institutes of English grammar, p. 19.
   Ies is the plural of the English name of the letter; the plural of the letter itself is rendered I’s, Is, i’s, or is.
2. ↑ “The Latin Alphabet” —  8 August 1999
3. ↑ “Frequency Table” —  {{{date}}}
4. ↑ O’Conner, Patricia T.; Kellerman, Stewart (2011-08-10). “Is capitalizing “I” an ego thing?”. Archived from the original. You must specify the date the archive was made using the |archivedate= parameter. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/08/capital.html. 
5. ↑ Gordon, Arthur E. (1983). Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy. University of California Press. pp. 44. ISBN 9780520038981. Archived from the original. You must specify the date the archive was made using the |archivedate= parameter. https://archive.org/details/illustratedintro0000gord. “roman numerals.” 
6. ↑ King, David A. (2001). The Ciphers of the Monks. Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 282. ISBN 9783515076401. Archived from the original. You must specify the date the archive was made using the |archivedate= parameter. https://books.google.com/books?id=PapljPXaSbwC&q=roman%20numerals%20letters&pg=PA282. “In the course of time, I, V and X became identical with three letters of the alphabet; originally, however, they bore no relation to these letters.” 
7. ↑ Svetunkov, Sergey (2012-12-14) (in en). Complex-Valued Modeling in Economics and Finance. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9781461458760. Archived from the original. You must specify the date the archive was made using the |archivedate= parameter. https://books.google.com/books?id=XNqvi56BT3IC&q=In+mathematics%2C+i+represents+the+unit+imaginary+number&pg=PA8. 
8. ↑ Boyd, Stephen; Vandenberghe, Lieven (2018). Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra: Vectors, Matrices, and Least Squares. Cambridge University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-1-108-56961-3. Archived from the original. You must specify the date the archive was made using the |archivedate= parameter. https://books.google.com/books?id=0IBcDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113. 
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5} “L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS” —  2004-04-19
10. ↑ “L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS” —  2002-03-20
11. ↑ “L2/20-125R: Unicode request for expected IPA retroflex letters and similar letters with hooks” —  2020-07-11
12. ↑ “L2/21-021: Reference doc numbers for L2/20-266R “Consolidated code chart of proposed phonetic characters” and IPA etc. code point and name changes” —  2020-12-07
13. ↑ “L2/00-159: Supplemental Terminal Graphics for Unicode” —  2000-03-31
14. ↑ “L2/17-076R2: Revised proposal for the encoding of an Egyptological YOD and Ugaritic characters” —  2017-05-09