I

How to spell i

1 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce i

What does i mean?

1. pronounThe first-person singular pronoun, used by a speaker or writer to refer to themselves as the subject of a sentence.

I in a sentence

• I finished the quarterly report just before the deadline.

• This morning i caught the early train into the city.

Where does i come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the English first-person singular pronoun, and it comes from the Old English word ic, which meant simply 'I'. That form descends from a shared Germanic ancestor (reconstructed as ik), and it has close cousins across the Germanic family, such as the Dutch ik and the German ich, all tracing back to the same Indo-European root that also gave Latin ego. Over the medieval centuries the Old English ic gradually lost its final consonant in unstressed everyday speech, shrinking to a single vowel sound. By the late Middle Ages this lone letter was being written as a capital I, partly because a small lowercase i standing entirely alone looked insignificant and could be lost on the handwritten page. That habit of always capitalising the pronoun, even mid-sentence, is unusual among the world's languages and remains a fixed convention of modern English spelling.

How the word is built

• i (single-word pronoun, no affixes; descended from Old English ic)

Words that sound like i

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• aye: An expression of agreement or assent meaning 'yes', used especially in voting and in nautical reply.
• eye: The organ in the head with which a person or animal sees.