EDIT ij The ij, like its uppercase version IJ (U+0132), is called “lange ij”, and it has been in continuous use in Dutch and Flemish texts from medieval times to the present day. No complete agreement exists on whether it is to be considered a letter in itself, or just as a ligature of i and j. Consequently in alphabetically ordered lists words beginning with ij (IJ) may either be found under the letter i, or as a separate letter following x. Linguists prefer to consider ij (IJ) only as a graphic variant, and range words beginning with it under the letter i as if the word in question started with i + j, and this seems to have become the preferred interpretation for sorting. Programmers who deal with sorting algorithms should be aware of the fact that the Unicode Standard defines a “compatibility decomposition” of ij to i + j, which may mean that provision should be made in sorting for the occurrence of ij (U+0133) and IJ (U+0132), depending on whether or not glyphs are decomposed before sorting.

Use of uppercase: all Dutch-language words beginning with ij (U+0133) should be uppercased and titlecased to begin with IJ (U+0132), and the same should apply to all Dutch-language words beginning with i + j. This is especially important in the case of personal and geographical names. Take for instance the personal name “IJsewijn”: this should never occur as “Ijsewijn”. Likewise with the Amsterdam water called “IJ” should never be written “Ij”!

like IJ, ij was also used widely in many pre-nineteenth-century texts as a regular ligature, mostly in Latin-language texts in which not a few inflected words have an -ii ending and in which the essentially medieval practice of graphically “ending” a string with a swash resulted in the lengthening of the last i in a string to j. For instance the word “genii” could just as well be written as “genij”. It should also be remembered that many numbers written with roman numerals end in strings of i’s, so that 1584 could well be written as mdlxxxiiij.

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