J is the 10th letter of the alphabet used for the modern English language. It is also used in a number of other languages, including French, German, and Spanish. The J sound occurs in words like jar and just.
J is a relatively recent addition to the letters. The letter J evolved from the letter I, so the early development of the two letters is the same. Scholars believe the letter I evolved from an Egyptian hieroglyph (pictorial symbol) that depicted a hand. The Phoenician letter that can be traced to that hieroglyph is the 10th letter of the Phoenician alphabet, yod. The Phoenicians used the letter to represent the beginning Y sound of yod, which was their word for hand. When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet around 800 B.C., they used the letter, which they named iota, for the sound of the vowel that is much like the consonant Y.
The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet about 700 B.C., and the Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet in 650 B.C. Both peoples continued to use I in this way.
In Europe in the Middle Ages (A.D. 400’s through the 1400’s), scribes began writing a lengthened form of I at the end of a word. They used this form especially for a Roman numeral, such as VIIJ (the numeral for eight). After the invention of printing in the late 1400’s, the long-tailed I, which began to look like J, was used at the beginning of a word, while an ordinary I was used in the middle. J began to be used for the consonant sound and I for the vowel sound in France in about 1620, and English printers soon followed this practice. But I and J were not considered to be separate letters until 1801, with the publication of William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary. Perry’s dictionary was first to alphabetize words separately under I and J.
