The spread of printing in Britain in the 1500s removed the legibility issue and had a standardizing effect that gradually returned many word spellings to I. Today the old Y versus I rivalry can still be glimpsed in such alternative spellings as flyer/flier, cyper/cipher, and tyre/tire.
Yet the medieval Y fad did leave one large legacy: Y’s plum job representing any final “i” sound in English. Today we use a “-y” suffix that encompasses four diverse categories: (1) adjectival forms of Old English words (stony, mighty, my); (2) nouns from Greek, Latin, or Old French that originally had endings like -ia, -ium, or -ie (empathy, remedy, tally); (3) other anglicizations (Henry, from French Henri); and (4) certain diminutives (Jimmy, kitty, dummy).
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