І, the letter i-desyaterichnoye

As it was written

History

The dotted і, also called decimal i after its former numeric value, or soft-dotted i, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel /i/, the sound of the i in the English word machine, and it is quite often, though not always, the equivalent of the letter И as used in Russian. It was used in Russian before the spelling reform of 1918, and it survives in the orthographies of Belarusian, Kazakh, Khakas, Komi, Carpathian Rusyn and Ukrainian: it is the twelfth letter of the Ukrainian alphabet, where it writes [i], and the tenth of the Belarusian, while Kazakh and Khakas give it the value /ɘ/.

Just as with the Latin letters I and J, the dot above this letter appears only in the lowercase form, and only where the letter is not already combined with a diacritic above it, as in the Ukrainian ї. Even where nothing else sits above it, the dot is not always rendered in historic texts, exactly as happened historically with Roman i and j, and some modern texts and font styles still discard the soft dot because the text reads without it; cursive styles are the exception. The current official rules of Belarusian orthography, dated 2008, leave printed uppercase І undotted but require the dot in lowercase and in handwritten uppercase.

Russian cursive, the handwritten form of the alphabet that most personal letters and schoolwork use, was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, which had itself come out of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books, and modern Cyrillic italic typefaces take their lowercase shapes mostly from it.

The reform prepared by Aleksey Shakhmatov and implemented shortly after the revolution of November 1917 conflated і with и, so that Іисусъ Христосъ became Иисус Христос, раіонъ became район and Россія became Россия. A common practice was the forced removal of the letters І, Ѳ and Ѣ from printing offices. Critics held that choosing Ии as the single letter for the sound defeated the aim of simplification, since Ии occupies more space and is sometimes hard to tell from Шш, and that the merger created homographs where spelling had kept meanings apart: миръ and мiръ, peace and world, both became мир.