Possible Duplicate:

I have serious question here. I just want to know whether to use small or capital letter for denoting I in a phrase. Considering the following example, can anyone help me which of the either one is correct.

Now i want to leave to home.
Now I want to leave to home.


One of the capitalization rules is, to capitalize the letter "I" when referring to yourself, so it must be capitalized:

In English, the nominative form of the singular first-person pronoun, "I", is normally capitalized, along with all its contractions (I'll, I'm, etc.).

So, it would be:

2) Now I want to leave for home.

as well as:

I'm leaving for home.

N.B. Only "i" when used as a pronoun is capitalized.

| improve this answer | |
  • Thanks. Bcoz I have seen people using small 'i' instead of 'I'. So I just thought that I should clarify it. – Andro Selva Jul 7 '11 at 5:11
  • Yeah. It's common practise to do that, especially during texting, but its not grammatically correct. – Thursagen Jul 7 '11 at 5:20
  • 6
    @Ham and Bacon: It's not an issue of grammaticality, just one of typographical convention. – Jon Purdy Jul 7 '11 at 5:46

The pronoun form of I should be capitalized in all cases where it stands alone. However, a word beginning with that letter follows normal capitalization rules.

| improve this answer | |
  • 1
    Think of I as a proper noun, like someone's name. For this reason, it should be capitalized. – njd Jul 7 '11 at 10:09
  • 2
    @njd By that logic, so should “You”, “He”, “She” and possibly “They”. Why does “I” have this special status (honest question, I have no idea, but it seems very odd and is particular to English). /EDIT: the answer is in the link of @psmears directly below the question. So your reason is wrong. – Konrad Rudolph Jul 7 '11 at 15:55
  • Meh. It's no more illogical than I is normally capitalized, but fair enough. I can't be bothered arguing. – njd Jul 8 '11 at 9:06
  • 1
    @njd Sorry but it's much simpler to just declare "I" to be an exception to the normal capitalization rules than it is to imply that there's some kind of rule about capitalizing pronouns that stand for a person's name and then have to explain that every pronoun except "I" is an exception to this rule. Occam's razor and all that. – David Richerby Jan 15 '19 at 18:21
