J, or j, is the tenth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Its usual name

in English is jay, with a now-uncommon variant jy . When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for
the y sound, it may be called yod or jod . History The letter J used to be used as the swash letter I, used
for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII
or xxiii for the Roman numeral representing 23. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German.
Gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his
Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana of 1524. Originally, 'I' and 'J'
were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing,, and ; however, Romance
languages developed new sounds that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J,
acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from .