Í

Í (lowercase í) is the Latin letter I carrying an acute accent (´), encoded in Unicode as U+00CD LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH ACUTE, with the lowercase form at U+00ED.^{1 • 2} It is one of the precomposed accented letters of the Latin-1 Supplement block and is used in several European orthographies, most prominently Spanish, where í marks a stressed vowel.^{1 • 3}

Encoding and normalization

Í sits in the Latin-1 Supplement, the block immediately above the basic ASCII range, alongside the other precomposed accented vowels such as Á, É, Ó, and Ú.¹ The character has existed since Unicode 1.1 in 1993, so it predates the large Latin Extended blocks that carry rarer combinations.¹

Like all precomposed accented letters, Í has a canonical decomposition. Under Normalization Form D (NFD) it splits into the base letter U+0049 I followed by the nonspacing combining acute accent U+0301; Normalization Form C (NFC) recombines that pair into the single code point U+00CD. The two spellings are canonically equivalent and should compare equal after normalization, which matters for string matching, searching, and deduplication in software.¹ The Unicode Character Database records the same decomposition (0049 0301) together with the simple lowercase mapping to 00ED.²

A rendering detail specific to i is that a dotted i followed by a nonspacing mark above loses its dot, so í is drawn without the dot; the standard notes that an accented dotted-i is not equivalent to an accented dotless-i (for example, i + diaeresis is not the same as ı + diaeresis), a distinction that matters for Turkish and for dictionary typography.⁵

Typing the character

Several input routes produce Í. In HTML and many programming contexts the named entity Í or the numeric reference Í can be used; on Windows the Alt code 0205 works on the numeric keypad.⁴ In Microsoft Word and WordPad, typing the hexadecimal code CD followed by Alt+X converts it to Í.¹ On keyboards with dead keys, pressing the acute dead key and then Shift+I produces the capital form directly.

Use in languages

The acute accent on i serves different purposes depending on the language. In Spanish, í marks that the vowel bears the word's stress, as in ídolo (idol), where the accent falls on the opening i; the pronunciation of the letter i itself varies very little across the Spanish-speaking world.³ Reference works describe Í simply as the letter I with an acute accent, and it belongs to the wider family of acute-accented Latin capitals that includes Á, Ć, É, Ń, Ó, Ś, Ú, and Ź.⁶

The acute-on-i combination is not limited to the single precomposed pair. Unicode also encodes rarer forms such as U+1E2E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE (Ḯ), used when a second diacritic stacks on top of the acute.⁷ Reference collections of accented i characters count 35 such characters in total across the standard, 17 lowercase and 18 capital and digraph forms, ranging from ì and î through į, ǐ, and ḯ.⁸

Related letters

The other precomposed I letters of the Latin-1 Supplement cover different diacritics with different functions: Ì (U+00CC) with grave, Î (U+00CE) with circumflex, used in Dutch, French, and Romanian, and Ï (U+00CF) with diaeresis, used in Catalan, Dutch, and French.⁹ Further along the standard, Latvian uses Ī (U+012A) with macron and Lithuanian uses Į (U+012E) with ogonek, each listed for those languages in the EU Publications Office character specification.⁹

References

1. Í U+00CD Latin Capital Letter I with Acute, UnicodeCharacter
2. Unicode Character Database: UnicodeData.txt, Unicode Consortium
3. How to Pronounce the Letter "I" in Spanish, SpanishDictionary.com
4. Latin letter I i, Key-Shortcut
5. The Unicode Standard, Chapter 7 (Europe-I), Unicode Consortium
6. Í, Wiktionary
7. Latin Extended Additional, NamesList, Unicode 18.0.0, Unicode Consortium
8. I with accent ì í î ï, Accent Characters
9. Latin letters, EU Vocabularies, Publications Office of the European Union

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 20, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 20, 2026; Oct 11, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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