Celtic Ogham

The word ogham (pronounced OH-yam) has been used to refer to:

An alphabet of twenty-five characters used for stone and wood inscriptions in Celtic Britain and Ireland.

An alphabet of twenty characters reportedly used for divination and hand-signing in Celtic paganism.

A group of twenty sacred trees that give names to the letters of the ogham alphabet.

A calendar of thirteen months named for some of the trees.

Structure of the script

The Ogham alphabet consists of twenty-five distinct characters (feda), the first twenty of which are considered to be primary, the last five (forfeda) supplementary. The four primary series are called aicmi (plural of aicme 'family'). Each aicme was named after its first character (Aicme Beithe, Aicme hUatha, Aicme Muine, Aicme Ailme, 'the B Group', 'the H Group', 'the M Group', 'the A Group'). Some of the names and all of the values of the forfeda are open to question. A possible twenty-sixth character is omitted here, as being inconsistently rendered and as wanting attestation in use; however space has been left for an additional character should it prove to be needed. The use of arrowheads to indicate direction is a very late development accommodated in the encoding. Several of the character names have long vowels in Irish, written with the acute accent (hUATH, nGETAL, UR, EBAD, OR); in a few instances, Damian McManus' normalized Old Irish nomenclature (1991:3) differs from the traditionally-recognized names, and the aliases BEITHE, NIN, UATH, GETAL, and IPHIN/PIN should be recognized.

Rendering

Monumental Ogham was incised on stone chiefly in a bottom-to-top direction, though there are examples of left-to-right bilingual inscriptions in Irish and Latin. Manuscript Ogham accommodated the horizontal left-to-right direction of the Latin script and the vowels were written as vertical strokes as opposed to the incised notches of the inscriptions.