How to type I with Grave

ì lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.

ì has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0069 Latin Small Letter I, U+0300 Combining Grave Accent. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing ì sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.

Its uppercase counterpart is Ì (U+00CC). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.

Typing ì without switching keyboard

ì is the letter I carrying a grave accent, and it is needed in French, Portuguese and Italian. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as I with something added.

Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + `, let go, then press i: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns the backtick key into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and ì costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.

What Unicode says about I with Grave

Unicode annotates ì directly. Against U+00EC the code chart carries the note “Italian, Malagasy”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.

How I with Grave behaves in software

ì is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.

Every way to write I with Grave

If ì arrives as ì

That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 AC are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00EC.