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Ogham Alphabet

The early-medieval Irish alphabet, letter by letter.

The early-medieval Irish alphabet - a simplified A-Z chart: 19 of the 20 primary letters plus three of the six later forfeda.

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OGHAMᚑᚅᚓ ᚋᚑᚏᚓ ᚉᚂᚔᚉᚉ
ANCIENT SCRIPTS

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THE HISTORY ◢

Ogham is an early-medieval alphabet used to write the earliest Irish, formed from sets of straight and slanting strokes crossing a central line. It survives mainly on standing stones, its monumental flowering in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, where names were carved along the stone’s edge.

THE LONG ANSWER ◢

Type our own name into the box above and it comes back as CLICCIDI. The K is gone and so is the Y, and that is not a bug we have been meaning to fix.

Ogham has twenty traditional letters. English has twenty-six. Seven of ours have no traditional sign of their own, so something has to give, and what gives is whichever of ours the carved alphabet had no sign for.

Key Takeaways

  • Unicode groups the Ogham block into 20 "Traditional letters" plus six "Forfeda (supplementary letters)".
  • Omniglot: "Originally Ogham consisted of 20 letters or four aicmí; the fifth acime [sic], or Forfeda, was added for use in manuscripts."
  • Our chart ships 19 traditional letters and 3 supplementary ones, for 22 glyphs across 26 inputs.
  • Four letters do not survive a round trip: K, J, Y and V.
  • DIAS dates the stones back at least as far as the 5th century AD, making them Ireland's earliest written records.

Why does the K disappear?

Because C and K are one sound doing one job, and Ogham committed a single sign to it.

Both map to ᚉ Coll, so a round trip has nowhere to put your K back. We ran every letter of the alphabet through our own translator, and exactly four come home as something else:

You type You get back Shared sign
K C ᚉ Coll
J I ᚔ Iodhadh
Y I ᚔ Iodhadh
V U ᚒ Ur

Four of your letters lose their identity to three shared signs. That is the arithmetic of pushing 26 inputs through a 22-glyph chart, and it is why the blurb above calls this a simplified A-Z rather than the real thing.

We could refuse your K outright instead. We would rather hand you an accurate glyph and tell you exactly what it cost.

If you want the opposite design, the runes are next door, where every letter gets its own dedicated sign and nothing doubles up.

What are the aicmí of the Ogham alphabet?

Groups of five. Four of them in the carved alphabet, five once you count the manuscript additions.

There are twenty-five letters "grouped into five aicmí (sing. aicme = group, class)" in Omniglot's description, which also supplies the rule that makes the naming obvious: "Each aicme is named after its first letter."

That gives us a method rather than a list. Omniglot supplies the rule, Unicode supplies the order, and chunking the twenty traditional letters into consecutive fives yields Beith, Uath, Muin and Ailm, each lending its name to the group of five it opens. The step we are taking on our own is assuming Unicode's code-point order preserves the traditional group boundaries, so treat the names as our derivation rather than a quote.

That fourth group is worth noticing, because it is the vowels: Ailm, Onn, Ur, Eadhadh and Iodhadh carry A, O, U, E and I. An alphabet that quarantines every vowel into one block of five is doing something structurally different from the one you are reading now, which is our reading of why Ogham looks alien rather than merely old.

What our chart quietly borrows

This is the part that is easy to get wrong, and it is worth being exact about.

Unicode splits the Ogham block into two labelled runs: "Traditional letters" at U+1681 to U+1694, which is exactly twenty, and "Forfeda (supplementary letters)" at U+1695 to U+169A, which is six. The forfeda belong to the manuscript period rather than the carved one, according to Omniglot.

Our two sources do not count the forfeda the same way, and the difference matters here. Omniglot's twenty-five is twenty letters plus a fifth aicme of five; Unicode lists six supplementary letters. So the two disagree by one, and Omniglot does not print its letter list, so we cannot tell you which five it means.

What we can tell you is the part the arithmetic rests on: Unicode files Peith under "Forfeda (supplementary letters)", not under "Traditional letters". Nothing we opened calls it traditional. That is why the count below is nineteen plus three regardless of how you settle the fifth aicme.

Our chart does not ship the twenty. It ships nineteen of them and borrows three supplementary letters:

  • Peith for P, Uilleann for W, Eamhancholl for X. All three sit in Unicode's supplementary run, not the traditional one.
  • nGéadal, a traditional letter, is missing entirely. No single English letter carries the sound it was for.

Nineteen plus three is the twenty-two you can actually produce above. So this is not a purely carved alphabet, and we would rather say so than let you assume every glyph you get out has a fifth-century parallel on a stone somewhere.

It was meant to be read up the edge of a stone

This is the thing the box above cannot show you, and it is the biggest thing we lose.

Ogham was cut into the edge of a standing stone. The inscriptions are, in Omniglot's description, "inscribed around the edges of rocks running from bottom to top and left to right, or left to right and horizontally in manuscripts."

Bottom to top. The sharp vertical corner of the stone is the line the letters hang off, and you read by walking your eye up it. Our output runs across a text box, because a text box has no edge and no up, which makes the horizontal form the only one we can give you.

DIAS describes the mechanism plainly: "These perpendicular cut stones bear inscriptions in the uniquely Irish Ogham alphabet, using a system of notches and horizontal or diagonal lines/scores to represent the sounds of an early form of the Irish language."

Notches and scores against a line. That is a design for a chisel and a corner, not for a page. Hieroglyphics is the other script here that runs short of signs and resolves it the same way ours does, by letting the first letter alphabetically keep the glyph.

How old is the Ogham alphabet?

Older than any other surviving Irish writing, and the two sources we opened do not print the same window.

DIAS puts the stones among "our earliest written records dating back at least as far as the 5th century AD". Omniglot dates monumental inscriptions "from the 4th to the 6th century AD, and in manuscripts dating from the 6th to the 9th century."

Those are compatible if you read DIAS's "at least as far as" as a minimum age rather than a start date. They are still not the same claim, and we are not going to average two sources into a number neither of them printed. What both do agree on is the sequence: carved on stone first, written into books later.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters are in the Ogham alphabet?

Twenty traditional letters, in four groups of five called aicmí. Unicode labels those twenty "Traditional letters" and lists a further six as "Forfeda (supplementary letters)"; Omniglot puts the forfeda in the manuscript period rather than the carved one.

Why does the Ogham translator change some of my letters?

Because seven English letters have no traditional Ogham sign of their own. Our chart maps C and K to one glyph, I, J and Y to another, and U and V to a third, so K, J, Y and V decode back as C, I, I and U. P, W and X survive only because we borrow supplementary letters for them.

Which way is Ogham read?

Up the edge of the stone. Inscriptions run "from bottom to top and left to right" on rock according to Omniglot, and left to right horizontally in manuscripts. The box above can only manage the horizontal version.

What are the aicmí?

Groups of five that the alphabet is organised into, each named after its own first letter, which Omniglot states as the rule. In the carved alphabet there are four, and the fifth is the manuscript-era forfeda. The final carved group is the vowels.

How old are Ogham inscriptions?

DIAS describes Ogham stones as "our earliest written records dating back at least as far as the 5th century AD". Omniglot dates monumental inscriptions from the 4th to the 6th century, with manuscripts from the 6th to the 9th. The two sources do not state identical windows.

Type your own name into the box above and see whether it survives the trip. If it has a K, a J, a Y or a V in it, it will not. The other ancient scripts each make their own compromise, and Phoenician makes a bigger one than this.

Sources