I

Latin alphabet
	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

I is the 9th letter in the Latin alphabet.

History

The letter I derived from the Greek iota (Ι, ι). It stood for the vowel /i/, the same as in the Etruscan alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek) /j/ (as English Y in YOKE) was added. In Semitic, /j/ was the usual sound value of Jôd (probably originally a pictogram for an arm with hand), /i/ only in foreign words.

In English, I represents different sounds, among them a diphthong that developed from /i:/ as well as short, open /I/ as in BILL. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is called a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters and both have uppercase (I, İ) and lowercase (ı, i) forms.

Alternate representations

India represents the letter I in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

In international Morse code the letter I is DitDit: · ·

In Braille the letter I is represented as ⠊ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,

Computing

In Unicode the capital I is codepoint U+0049 and the lowercase i is U+0069.

The ASCII code for capital D is 68 and for lowercase d is 100; or in binary 01001001 and 01101001, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital I is 201 and for lowercase i is 137.

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

Meanings for I

• In biochemistry, I is the symbol for isoleucine.
• In chemistry, I is the symbol for iodine.
• In computing, <i> is the HTML tag for marking italic type. It is also commonly used as the name of the index variable in for loops when no other name suggests itself.
• In English, I is a pronoun denoting the first person, singular.
• In film, I is the name of a Swedish film made in 1966. See I (film).
• In international licence plate codes, I stands for Italy.
• In mathematics,
  • i denotes the imaginary unit, a complex number whose square is -1.
  • I denotes the closed unit interval, which contains all real numbers from 0 to 1, inclusive
  • I denotes the identity matrix.
• In music, I is the name of the winner of the Norwegian version of Pop Idol and also World Idol, Kurt Nilsen's debut album. See I (album).
• In physics and electronic engineering, I is often the variable for electric current. The imaginary unit is represented by j instead.
• In radiocommunication, I is the ITU prefix allocated to Italy.
• In Roman numerals, I denotes the number one.
• In structural engineering I is used for the moment of inertia

See also

Ì, Í, Î, Ï, Ĭ, İ

Two-letter combinations starting with I:

• ia ib ic id ie if ig ih ii ij ik il im in io ip iq ir is it iu iv iw ix iy iz