I

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Phoenician Yodh	Etruscan I	Greek Iota

In Semitic, the letter mey hae originatit in a hieroglyph for an airm that representit a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/) in Egyptian, but wis reassigned tae /j/ (as in Inglis "yes") bi Semites, acause thair wird for "airm" began wi that soond. This letter coud an aa be uised tae represent /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign wirds.

The Greeks adoptit a fairm o this Phoenician yodh as thair letter iota (⟨Ι, ι⟩) tae represent /i/, the same as in the Auld Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modren Greek), it wis an aa uised tae represent /j/ an this uise persists in the leids that descendit frae Latin. The modren letter 'j' wis firstly a variation o 'i', an baith wur uised interchyngeably for baith the vowel an the consonant, comin tae be differentiated anly in the 16t century. The dot ower the lawercase 'i' is whiles cried a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted an dotless I are considered separate letters, representin a front an back vowel, respectively, an baith hae uppercase ('I', 'İ') an lawercase ('ı', 'i') fairms.

In modren Inglis, 'i' represents different soonds, aither a "lang" diphthong /aɪ/ as in kite, which developed frae Middlin Inglis /iː/ efter the Great Vowel Shift o the 15t century, or the "short" /ɪ/ as in bill.

The letter 'I' is the fift maist common letter in the Inglis leid. It is an aa uised in mathematics tae denote the imaginary unit ${\displaystyle i}$ 

¹ An aa for encodings based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.

• Tittle
• Imaginary unit

Relatit letters an ither similar characters

• İ i an I ı : Latin dotted an dotless letter i
• І і : Cyrillic saft-dottit letter i
• И и : Cyrillic letter i