Sixteen hundred years ago the Irish cut names into the edges of standing stones, one stroke at a time. Type a name and see it carved the old way — read from the bottom up, exactly as you would read the stone itself.
Reads from the bottom up, the way it was carved.
Ogham was cut for Primitive Irish, a language older than anything in the manuscripts, and it was used almost entirely for names on memorial stones. Putting a modern name into ogham is therefore a translation across fifteen centuries: it is done letter by letter, and some letters simply had no ogham of their own.
Ogham is not twenty separate shapes to be memorised. It is one line and four ways of crossing it, which is why it can be cut with a chisel by someone working from the arris of a pillar and counting.
The letters come in four groups of five, the aicmí. One group is strokes to the right of the line, one to the left, one crossing it at an angle, and one cutting straight through it as notches. Within each group the letter is simply how many strokes there are: one to five. Learn the four directions and you can read the count off any stone without knowing a word of the language.
A fifth group, the forfeda, was added later and belongs mostly to the manuscripts rather than the stones. They barely appear in inscriptions, and were eventually put to work as diphthongs.
There is no agreement on why ogham exists at all, and the competing explanations are unusually far apart.
Most scholars think it was modelled on the Latin alphabet, which the Irish would have known from Roman Britain in the 4th century. Thurneysen and Vendryes argued instead that the shapes come from a tally system built on fives and twenties, which fits how the letters are counted. Carney and MacNeill went further and proposed it was invented deliberately as a script Rome could not read, by scholars or druids who wanted to write something down privately.
A borrowed alphabet, a counting system, or a cipher. The evidence has not settled it.
Almost everything written about ogham calls it a tree alphabet, each letter named for a tree: beith the birch, dair the oak, coll the hazel. It is a good story, and it is much younger than the thing it describes.
The tree names belong to the Old Irish period, around the 10th century. That is centuries after the stones were cut and after Primitive Irish had stopped being spoken. Medieval glossators, working on an alphabet already old and strange to them, supplied meanings for the letter names. Only about eight of the twenty are securely tree names at all; the rest were fitted to the idea afterwards.
So the trees are real medieval Irish scholarship and worth knowing. They are just not what the people cutting the stones had in mind.
Ogham was made for Primitive Irish, and Primitive Irish did not have every sound English has. There is no letter for J, K, V, W or Y as we use them, and the alphabet is famously awkward about P, a sound the language had largely lost.
So writing a modern name in ogham is a transliteration across fifteen centuries, not a translation, and it involves decisions. The tool above makes those decisions letter by letter and tells you each time it has substituted something, rather than quietly smoothing it over. A name that comes out shorter than you expect has usually lost a letter that had nowhere to go.
This page is about the alphabet. The stones are the other half of it, and they have their own page: where the surviving inscriptions are, what they actually say, and why so many of them are in two counties. The ogham stones of Ireland maps the 21 on this site, across 6 counties.
Ogham is the earliest form of writing in Ireland: an alphabet of strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone, used from roughly the 4th to the 6th century AD. About 400 inscriptions survive, mostly in Munster and in Wales, and nearly all of them are names — usually 'X son of Y' on a memorial or boundary stone.
You read it from the bottom left of the stone, upward along the edge, across the top and down the right-hand side. The edge itself is the stem, called the droim; the letters are groups of one to five strokes cut to the right of it, to the left of it, at an angle across it, or as notches straight through it.
Not originally. The letters have names like beith and dair which are also tree names, and by about the 10th century medieval scholars had built a whole 'tree alphabet' tradition on that. But only eight of the twenty names are actually tree names, and the idea postdates the inscriptions by centuries. Robert Graves popularised the tree reading again in the 20th century.
Approximately. Ogham was made for Primitive Irish and has no letter for J, K, V, W or Y as we use them, so those are substituted with the nearest sound — and this tool tells you whenever it has done so. Five extra letters, the forfeda, were added centuries later for sounds the original twenty could not carry.
The ogham stones themselves — 21 of them, mapped and county by county →
Thirteen are in Kerry alone; Cork and Kerry together hold about 60 per cent
of every ogham stone in Ireland.
· Irish first names A–Z