I | History, Etymology, & Pronunciation | Britannica (2025)

i, ninth letter of the alphabet. It corresponds to the Semitic yod, which may derive from an early symbol for hand, and to the Greek iota (Ι). Early Greek forms from the island of Thera resembled the Semitic more than the later single vertical stroke. In Attic and early Corinthian inscriptions a form resembling an S appears. The Chalcidian alphabet had the form I, and this was the form in all the Italic alphabets, including the Etruscan.

The minuscule letter is merely a shortened form of the majuscule. The dot first appears in manuscripts of about the 11th century and was used to distinguish the letter and assist reading in words in which it was in close proximity to letters such as n or m (inimicis, for example). The dot frequently took the form of a dash. It became the custom in medieval manuscripts to distinguish an initial or otherwise prominent i by continuing it below the line, and it was from this habit that the differentiation of the letters i and j arose. The initial letter, nearly always lengthened, had most frequently a consonantal force, and this led to j representing the consonant, i the vowel. The two letters were not considered as separate until the 17th century.

In Semitic the letter represented a sound akin to the English y. In Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages it has represented a high front vowel similar to English long e, as in be. In Latin short i represented a considerably more open sound than long i, as is evidenced by the fact that in Late Latin it ran together with long e. In modern English the sound of short i is almost identical to what it was in Latin—e.g., in the word pit. Long i has become a diphthong (ai, as in the word ice), its former sound as a high front vowel having been assumed by long e as its position shifted forward and upward.

In words such as fir the letter represents the neutral vowel, while in certain words it retains a Continental sound, identical to that which it represented in Middle English—e.g, in the words pique and emir. The combinations ei and ie, as in receive and believe, have in the great majority of cases the sound of the long e in precede, although the long i sound of tide is found in many local and personal names of German origin and in a few other foreign borrowings—e.g., cider. The vowel sound in either is optional. In chemistry I is the symbol for iodine.