Illustration by Diana Gerstacker; Photo by Catherine Falls Commercial/ Getty Images
We know and love it as the 10th letter of the alphabet, but good old “j” was actually late to the ABCs party — every other letter was added first. Its placement between “i” and “k” is explained by the fact that it began as a swash, or typographical flourish used to embellish “i,” usually at the end of a Roman numeral. Take “XIIJ,” or 13, for instance: In this case, the “J” is used in place of a third “I” to signify that a series of ones has reached its end. And for many years, “i” and “j” were used interchangeably to write both the vowel and consonant sounds, in words like “ice” or “January.”
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibIt’s actually “e,” which appears in 11.1% of all words in English (or at least in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary). “A” is next at 8.5%, followed by “r” at 7.6%. The least common is “q,” which appears in just 0.2% of the dictionary’s entries.
We have the Italian writer and scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) to thank for giving “j” its much-deserved place at the table. He did so in a 1524 text called Epistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (“Trissino’s epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language”), which marked the first time “i” and “j” were distinguished as separate letters. As with much else in European history, this ultimately relates to Jesus: Distinguishing the soft “j” sound helped Trissino decide that the Greek word Iesus, a translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, should be spelled — and pronounced — the way it is today. Yet it would take centuries for the letters “i” and “j” to fully differentiate; as late as 1755, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson still referred to “j” as a variant of “i.”
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The former 27th letter of the alphabet was the ______.
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The former 27th letter of the alphabet was the ampersand.
The dot over “i” and “j” is called a “tittle.”
We tend to think that languages like French and Arabic have lots of diacritical marks, better known as accents, while English is comparatively unadorned. In fact, only the lowercase “i” and “j” have them — and they’re called “tittles.” The word comes to us from the Latin titulus, which means “inscription” or “heading,” and dates back to the 11th century. Since “i” and “j” look similar to other letters with vertical strokes, the tittle was added to differentiate them and eliminate confusion.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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