The letter I in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 2 and 4 sit diagonally, middle-left to top-right — the opposite diagonal to e. Nothing is raised in row 1 on the left, which is the fastest way to distinguish it.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and I is part of the family that starts with i. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. This family is worth knowing for what the third step produces: not a letter at all, but the “the” contraction. The full braille alphabet sets all ten families out side by side.

The alphabet runs out before this family does. There are only 26 letters, and the shapes in this part of the cell space went to the words English uses most instead — which is why i plus dots 3 and 6 gives you a whole word rather than a letter. The contraction reference shows the other cells that were assigned this way.

Move it down a row and it becomes punctuation

Take the shape of I and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5, and so on. The result is the “in” contraction.

This is how the punctuation marks were built, which makes them much less work to learn than they look: if you know the first ten letters you already know the shapes, and only have to remember they sit lower in the cell. The full punctuation table follows the same pattern.

I is also the digit 9

The first ten letters double as the digits. Put a number sign — dots 3-4-5-6 — in front, and every letter that follows reads as a number until a space or a letter sign ends the run. So I on its own is the letter, but after a number sign it is 9.

This is the single commonest source of confusion for people reading braille numbers — a run of digits takes one number sign at the start, not one per digit. How braille numbers work covers the whole rule.

Where I turns up in Grade 2

I is not one of the letters that stands for a whole word on its own, but it does appear inside contractions that combine it with another letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital I

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital I is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from I by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with I, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.