ASCII 73 — I

The uppercase letter I (ASCII code 73) is the ninth letter of the modern Latin alphabet, evolved from the Phoenician yod (meaning arm) through Greek iota. In English text, the letter i appears with a frequency of approximately 7.0%, ranking as the 5th most common letter. I is the thinnest letter in most typefaces and uniquely serves as both a vowel and the first-person singular pronoun — the only single-letter pronoun in English.

The 26 uppercase Latin letters span ASCII codes 65 through 90, forming the capital letter block of the character set. Their placement exactly 32 code positions before the corresponding lowercase letters (97–122) was a deliberate engineering decision enabling case conversion through toggling a single bit. Uppercase letters are essential for proper nouns, sentence openings, acronyms, and programming constants. Early computing systems often supported only uppercase characters, making ASCII's inclusion of both cases a forward-looking design choice.

In the ASCII encoding table, Uppercase Letter I is assigned code point 73 in decimal (0x49 hexadecimal, 111 octal, 01001001 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Uppercase Letter I works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.