Dotted I also called Decimal I, is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

.

It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel

Close front unrounded vowel

The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ....

 /i/, like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "machine".

It is used in the orthographies of the Belarusian

Belarusian language

The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

, Kazakh

Kazakh language

Kazakh is a Turkic language which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak....

, Khakas

Khakas language

Khakas is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas people, who mainly live in the southern Siberian Khakas Republic, or Khakassia, in Russia...

, Komi

Komi language

The Komi language is a Finno-Permic language spoken by the Komi peoples in the northeastern European part of Russia. Komi is one of the two members of the Permic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric branch...

, Rusyn

Rusyn language

Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...

 and Ukrainian

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

 languages, where it is the equivalent of the Cyrillic letter I

I (Cyrillic)

I is a letter used in almost all ancient and modern Cyrillic alphabets.It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "machine", or the near-close near-front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "bin".-History:The Cyrillic letter I was...

 (И и) as used in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 and other languages.

History

Dotted I was derived from the Greek letter Iota (Ι ι).

The name of this letter in the Early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

 was (i/ižei), meaning "and".

In the Cyrillic numeral system

Cyrillic numerals

The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....

, Dotted I had a value of 10.

In the early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

 there was little or no distinction between the Cyrillic letter I

I (Cyrillic)

I is a letter used in almost all ancient and modern Cyrillic alphabets.It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "machine", or the near-close near-front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "bin".-History:The Cyrillic letter I was...

 (И и), derived from the Greek letter Eta

Eta (letter)

Eta ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. Originally denoting a consonant /h/, its sound value in the classical Attic dialect of Ancient Greek was a long vowel , raised to in medieval Greek, a process known as itacism.In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8...

, and Dotted I. They both remained in the alphabetical repertoire because they represented different numbers in the Cyrillic numeral system, eight and ten respectively, and are therefore sometimes referred to as octal I and decimal I.

Usage

Language	Notes
Belarusian Belarusian language The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...	in current use
Bulgarian Bulgarian language Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...	in use until 1878
Kazakh Kazakh language Kazakh is a Turkic language which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak....	in current use
Khakas Khakas language Khakas is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas people, who mainly live in the southern Siberian Khakas Republic, or Khakassia, in Russia...	in current use
Komi Komi language The Komi language is a Finno-Permic language spoken by the Komi peoples in the northeastern European part of Russia. Komi is one of the two members of the Permic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric branch...	in current use
Macedonian Macedonian language Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...	this letter or the letter ⟨Й⟩ were used by Macedonian authors to represent the sound /j/ until the introduction of the letter ⟨Ј⟩
Russian Russian language Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...	in use until 1918, when a significant reform of the Russian orthography came into effect
Rusyn Rusyn language Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...	in current use
Ukrainian Ukrainian language Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....	in current use

Rules for usage in Russian (pre-1918)

• write "i" before all vowels and before semivowel "й"
• write "и" before consonants and as the last letter of a word
• exception 1: write "и" before (semi)vowels in compound words (пятиакровый: пяти+акровый, five-acre)
• exception 2: write "и" in "миръ" for "peace, tranquility, concord, union", and "i" in "мiръ" for "world, universe, local community, commons, society, laity", with all derived words.

The distinction between миръ ("peace") and мiръ ("world") led to the legend that Tolstoy's

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

 War and Peace

War and Peace

War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...

 was originally titled "War and (the) World".

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ι ι : Greek letter Iota
• И и : Cyrillic letter I
• Ї ї : Cyrillic letter Yi
• Й й : Cyrillic letter Short I
• Ј ј : Cyrillic letter Јe

Computing codes

character	І		і
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BYELORUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN I		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BYELORUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN I
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1030	0406	1110	0456
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	208 134	D0 86	209 150	D1 96
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	І	І	і	і
KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...	182	B6	166	A6
Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:...	139	8B	138	8A
Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages...	178	B2	179	B3
ISO-8859-5	166	A6	246	F6
Macintosh Cyrillic	167	A7	180	B4