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| a chattering or flighty, light-headed person. |
| an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle. |
| we (wiː) | |
| —pron | |
| 1. | refers to the speaker or writer and another person or other people: we should go now |
| 2. | refers to all people or people in general: the planet on which we live |
| 3. | a. when used by editors or other writers, and formerly by monarchs, a formal word for I |
| b. (as noun): he uses the royal we in his pompous moods | |
| 4. | informal used instead of you with a tone of persuasiveness, condescension, or sarcasm: how are we today? |
| [Old English wē, related to Old Saxon wī, Old High German wir, Old Norse vēr, Danish, Swedish vi, Sanskrit vayam] | |
"The reason for writing I is ... the orthographic habit in the middle ages of using a 'long i' (that is, j or I) whenever the letter was isolated or formed the last letter of a group; the numeral 'one' was written j or I (and three iij, etc.), just as much as the pronoun." [Otto Jespersen, "Growth and Structure of the English Language," p.233]The form ich or ik, especially before vowels, lingered in northern England until c.1400 and survived in southern dialects until 18c. The dot on the "small" letter -i- began to appear in 11c. L. manuscripts, to distinguish the letter from the stroke of another letter (such as -m- or -n-). Originally a diacritic, it was reduced to a dot with the introduction of Roman type fonts. The basic word for "I" in Japanese is watakushi, but it is not much used. Words that boys usually use are boku (polite) or ore (OH-ray), a rougher word, which can be rude depending on the situation. Girls usually use atashi (a feminine-sounding word) or the neutral watashi, but a tomboy might use boku like boys do.
I
The symbol for the element iodine.
iThe symbol for current.
| iodine (ī'ə-dīn') Pronunciation Key
Symbol I A shiny, grayish-black element of the halogen group. It is corrosive and poisonous and occurs in very small amounts in nature except for seaweed, in which it is abundant. Iodine compounds are used in medicine, antiseptics, and dyes. Atomic number 53; atomic weight 126.9045; melting point 113.5°C; boiling point 184.35°C; specific gravity (solid, at 20°C) 4.93; valence 1, 3, 5, 7. See Periodic Table. |
| We Wednesday |