Idotless

Idotless is a term used in typography and orthography to refer to forms of the letter i that lack a dot above the character. The more common term is dotless i, and idotless appears occasionally as a compact variant in discussions of typography or encoding.

In languages such as Turkish and Azerbaijani, the dotless i corresponds to the lowercase character ı (Unicode U+0131). This letter contrasts with the lowercase i (U+0069), which carries a dot. The uppercase correspondences are I (U+0049) for the dotless form and İ (U+0130) for the dotted form. This distinction is central to the alphabets’ orthography and case mappings, as the two letters represent different sounds in Turkish.

Encoding and typography: Dotless i can cause issues in fonts and software that assume a single i. Some font families include separate glyphs for dotless i and dotted i; software must apply locale-aware case conversion to preserve letters correctly.

In computing and typesetting, the term dotless i is common; idotless is rare but may appear in some style guides or discussions. The concept highlights the importance of accurate character representation in multilingual text and the role of Unicode in differentiating visually similar but functionally distinct letters.