What ogham actually is
Ogham is the earliest script the Irish language ever had: an alphabet of scores and notches cut against a stemline, surviving mainly on standing stones in Ireland and western Britain from roughly the fourth to the seventh century. Most of what the stones say is names (a person, a father, a people) which is why a name in ogham is the honest modern use of it.
The real history, kept honest
The stones read from the bottom up, usually along the edge of the stone, and the surviving corpus is a few hundred inscriptions in an early form of Irish. Scholarship on the script’s origin is genuinely unsettled. Arguments run from Latin-alphabet influence to older native tradition, and this page takes no side, because we could not cite one. The standard modern reference is Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991); what this site claims about ogham stays within what a reader can check there.
The letters, stroke by stroke
Twenty classical letters in four families (aicmí), each letter one to five strokes. These are drawn by the same code that draws every ogham stroke on this site. Never a font, so no font substitution can quietly break a carving.
B-aicme: scored right of the stem
- B: 1 stroke
- L: 2 strokes
- F: 3 strokes
- S: 4 strokes
- N: 5 strokes
H-aicme: scored left of the stem
- H: 1 stroke
- D: 2 strokes
- T: 3 strokes
- C: 4 strokes
- Q: 5 strokes
M-aicme: scored across the stem
- M: 1 stroke
- G: 2 strokes
- Z: 4 strokes
- R: 5 strokes
Vowels: notched on the stem
- A: 1 stroke
- O: 2 strokes
- U: 3 strokes
- E: 4 strokes
- I: 5 strokes
Our conventions, in public
Ogham predates the síneadh fada, so names carve with their fadas folded, Seán carves as SEAN, and the fada stays essential everywhere else the name is written. Ogham also never had J, K, V, W, X or Y; where a name needs one we use a documented substitution and say so on the page, never a silent guess:
- J → I: Ogham has no J; J grew out of I, so we carve I.
- K → C: Ogham has no K; C carries the same sound.
- V → F: Ogham has no V; F is its nearest kin in Irish.
- W → U: Ogham has no W; we carve the U it came from.
- X → CS: Ogham has no X; we carve its two sounds, C then S.
- Y → I: Ogham has no Y; we carve I, its vowel sound.
Anything we cannot honestly transliterate is refused with a reason rather than invented. And on the name pages you will find no “meanings”. Name etymology is folklore-ridden, and where we cannot cite, we say nothing.
Your name in ogham
101 common Irish names, each carved letter by letter with its pronunciation: