I in Different Fonts

A hand reduced to a stroke

The Phoenician letter yodh meant “arm” or “hand” and stood for a /y/ sound. Greek turned it into the vowel iota, written as a single vertical stroke, and the Romans kept that stroke for both the vowel /i/ and the consonant /j/ (as in Iulius, said “Yulius”). The letter J only split off from I in the Renaissance, which is why the two still sit side by side in the alphabet.

The dot on lowercase i, called a tittle, appeared in medieval manuscripts to keep i from vanishing into neighbouring strokes of m, n and u in dense blackletter. You can see why in Fraktur: 𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔦𝔪𝔲𝔪 is a row of near-identical stems.

Two borrowed capitals

I is one of only three letters (with H and R) that are borrowed from the Letterlike Symbols block in both the script and Fraktur alphabets:

So “ℐ𝓈𝒶𝒷ℯ𝓁𝓁𝒶” in regular script has two borrowed letters (I and e), while “𝓘𝓼𝓪𝓫𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓪” in bold script has none. If you want a gothic I that matches, use bold gothic. Be aware that Fraktur capital I and J look almost the same, a trait inherited from blackletter, where the two were long treated as one letter.

The dot problem

Lowercase i is the only letter whose dot carries meaning in some languages. Turkish and Azerbaijani have ı (dotless) and i (dotted) as separate vowels, each with its own capital: I and İ. This causes a well-known software bug: converting “i” to uppercase in a Turkish locale gives İ, not I, which has broken logins and file names in real programs.

For styled text this matters in two ways. The squiggle style uses ı for i, which reads as a different letter to Turkish speakers. And the maths alphabets include a separate dotless italic 𝚤 (U+1D6A4), made so that accents can sit on i without a dot underneath.

Look-alikes everywhere

Few letters have as many twins as capital I:

• l (lowercase L), 1 (digit one), | (vertical bar)
• Ι Greek iota (U+0399) and І Cyrillic i (U+0406), used in Ukrainian and Belarusian
• Ӏ Cyrillic palochka (U+04C0)
• Ⅰ Roman numeral one (U+2160)

In a sans-serif font, these are often pixel-identical, which makes I a favourite for fake usernames and look-alike domains. Our guide to how fancy text works explains why styled math letters fold back to plain text while these look-alikes don’t. Choose a style with a distinctive I if being read correctly matters, for example script, monospace or small caps ɪ (U+026A, the IPA vowel in “sit”).

Tiny i

I is fully covered at small sizes: superscript ᴵ and ⁱ, subscript ᵢ, and small caps ɪ. The superscript ⁱ (U+2071) lives in the main Superscripts and Subscripts block, while ᴵ comes from Phonetic Extensions, so the two may differ slightly in size. The small text generator shows them side by side.

Writing and using I

For the handwritten version, the cursive capital I is one of the least recognisable cursive letters (it’s often mistaken for a J); the cursive I page shows how to form it. As a single-letter word, “I” is always a capital in English, so in small caps or superscript the pronoun loses its distinction from the lowercase.

Frequency

I is about 7.0% of English letters, fifth after E, T, A and O. Combined with how many i’s a sentence contains in -ing and -tion, a style with an awkward i shows on almost every line.