I'm

How to spell i'm

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce i'm

What does i'm mean?

1. otherA shortened form of 'I am', used to state who or how the speaker is.

I'm in a sentence

• I'm certain the meeting starts at nine.

• I'm taking the early train to avoid the traffic.

Where does i'm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction of the two native English words 'I' and 'am'. The pronoun 'I' descends from Old English 'ic', a word of Germanic stock that gradually wore down to a single sounded letter. 'Am' comes from Old English 'eom', the first-person present form of 'beon' (to be), and traces back through Germanic to the same ancient root that gives Latin 'sum' and Sanskrit 'asmi', both meaning 'I am'. The squeezed-together written form became common as English writers began marking dropped sounds with an apostrophe in the 1600s. The apostrophe stands precisely where the letter a of 'am' has been removed, which is the whole point of the spelling: leave it out and you get the meaningless 'im'.

How the word is built

• I (first-person pronoun)
• 'm (contracted form of 'am', the apostrophe marking the dropped letter a)