U+3044 "い" Hiragana Letter I Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
い
U+3044 "い" Hiragana Letter I is a fundamental character in the Japanese writing system, representing the vowel sound "i" as in the English word "eat." It belongs to the Hiragana script, which is used for native Japanese words, grammatical elements, and phonetic spelling, and it is one of the 46 basic syllables taught in elementary language education. The character evolved from a cursive style of the Chinese character 以, and it is commonly found in a wide range of Japanese texts, from children's books to formal documents, and appears in many common words like いぬ (inu, meaning "dog") and いる (iru, meaning "to be" or "to exist"). Its simple, flowing shape consists of two strokes, making it one of the easier characters for beginners to learn.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+3044 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hiragana Letter I |
| Block | Hiragana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | い |
| HTML Hex Encoding | い |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x81 0x84 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x3044 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00003044 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u3044 |