I'll

How to spell i'll

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce i'll

What does i'll mean?

1. verbA contraction of 'I will' or 'I shall', expressing the speaker's own future action or intention.

I'll in a sentence

• I'll call the office first thing tomorrow morning.

• I'll pay you back as soon as my salary arrives.

Where does i'll come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction of the pronoun 'I' with the auxiliary verbs 'will' or 'shall', and each part carries a long history of its own. The pronoun 'I' descends from Old English 'ic', a native Germanic word that gradually shed its final consonant in everyday speech. 'Will' comes from Old English 'willan', meaning 'to want' or 'to intend', while 'shall' comes from 'sculan', which originally meant 'to owe' or 'to be obliged'. The merged spoken forms were written out with an apostrophe from around the seventeenth century, the apostrophe standing in for the missing letters. The whole spelling trap lives in that apostrophe: drop it and you write 'ill', and because the word sounds exactly like 'aisle' and 'isle', writers reaching for it sometimes grab the wrong homophone entirely.

How the word is built

• I (first-person pronoun)
• 'll (contracted will or shall, with the apostrophe marking the dropped letters wi or sha)

Words that sound like i'll

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

• aisle: A passage between rows of seats or shelves, such as in a shop, church, plane, or theatre.
• isle: A small island, often used poetically or in place names.