Ogham Translator
Type a word or a name and see it in ogham, the alphabet of strokes cut along the edges of standing stones in Ireland and western Britain between the 4th and 6th centuries. The result uses the Unicode Ogham block, opens and closes with the feather marks that frame an inscription, divides words with the ogham space, and reads back to text approximately.
How to use the ogham translator
- Type a name, a word or a sentence. The ogham appears between feather marks as you type.
- Use ordinary spelling: c and k share coll, f, v and w share fearn, and ng, ea, oi, ui and ae each get one letter.
- To read ogham, switch to ogham to text and paste the strokes. Shared letters come back as k, f and i.
- Copy the result and paste it anywhere with an ogham font; the feather marks and word spaces copy with it.
Examples
| Eire | ᚛ᚓᚔᚏᚓ᚜ |
| Brigid | ᚛ᚁᚏᚔᚌᚔᚇ᚜ |
| Dublin | ᚛ᚇᚒᚁᚂᚔᚅ᚜ |
About Ogham
Ogham is the earliest writing system made for the Irish language. About 400 inscriptions survive, most carved between the 4th and 6th centuries AD, and the great majority are in Ireland, concentrated in the south west in Kerry, Cork and Waterford. The rest are in the parts of western Britain where Irish speakers settled: south Wales, Cornwall, Devon, the Isle of Man and Scotland, and the Welsh stones are often bilingual, with the same name in Latin letters beside the ogham. Almost all are memorials. A typical stone reads "X MAQI Y", the name of the person commemorated, then MAQI, "son of", then the father's name, in the language scholars call Primitive Irish, the ancestor of Old Irish. From the 8th century ogham also appears in manuscripts, and the medieval treatises Auraicept na nÉces and In Lebor Ogaim describe the alphabet, its letter names and its lore.
The alphabet is a set of strokes made against a stem line, the druim, which on a stone is usually the edge itself. The 20 original letters fall into four groups of five, the aicmí: strokes to one side of the stem for b, l, f, s and n; strokes to the other side for h, d, t, c and q; long diagonal strokes across it for m, g, ng, z and r; and short notches on the stem for the vowels a, o, u, e and i. Within a group, letters are told apart by the number of strokes, from one to five. An inscription is read from the bottom up the left edge and, if it is long, across the top and down the other side. Five extra letters, the forfeda, were added later for ea, oi, ui, ae and p. Several letter names are trees, beith birch, fearn alder, coll hazel, dair oak, which is where the medieval idea of a "tree alphabet" came from; most of the names are not trees at all.
This translator writes modern English, or any text in Latin letters, with ogham letters. a, b, c, d, e, g, l, m, n, o, q, r, s, t, u and z each have a letter of their own, from ᚐ ailm to ᚎ straif; h takes ᚆ úath and p takes ᚚ peith, the late letter added for a sound Primitive Irish did not have. Letters ogham never had are folded into their nearest neighbors, as most charts do: c and k both become ᚉ coll; f, v and w all become ᚃ fearn; i, j and y all become ᚔ idad; and x becomes the pair ᚉᚄ. Five digraphs are matched before single letters: ng gives ᚍ gétal, and ea, oi, ui and ae give the forfeda ᚕ, ᚖ, ᚗ and ᚙ. Case is ignored, since ogham has none. Words are divided with the ogham space at U+1680, and the whole text is enclosed in the feather marks ᚛ and ᚜, which mark where an inscription starts and ends. "Eire" becomes ᚛ᚓᚔᚏᚓ᚜.
The output uses the Ogham block that Unicode added in version 3.0 in 1999, at U+1680 to U+169F, so it can be copied and pasted anywhere that accepts text. It runs left to right on screen, which is how Unicode defines it and how the manuscripts wrote it; a carved inscription reads upward, so to lay the text out as a stone would you turn the result on its end. Most current systems ship a font that covers the block, but a device without one shows empty boxes. Decoding runs the table backwards and is approximate, because several English letters share one sign: the tool returns k for ᚉ, f for ᚃ and i for ᚔ, and everything in lowercase, so "world", written ᚛ᚃᚑᚏᚂᚇ᚜, comes back as "forld". The ogham letters carry no record of which English letter produced them.
That is the limit to keep in mind. The page writes English in ogham letters; it does not translate anything into Irish, Old Irish or Primitive Irish, and a name on a real ogham stone would be in its 5th-century Primitive Irish form, with its own case endings, not an English spelling. Some sounds are awkward. The original alphabet had no p, because the language had lost the sound, h is rare on the stones and its value is disputed, and v, w, j and y have no letters of their own. Used with that in mind, the tool does what the ogham charts in museums and tattoo studios do, only faster and with copyable text: it lets you see a name, a word or a motto in the strokes of the earliest Irish writing.
Frequently asked questions
Does this translate English into Irish or Old Irish?
No. It writes the English, or any Latin-spelled text, you type in ogham letters, one letter at a time. The stones were carved in Primitive Irish, an early form of the language with different words and endings, and a real inscription of a name would use that form. To have ogham in Irish, type the Irish word: "Éire" typed as Eire gives ᚛ᚓᚔᚏᚓ᚜, which is the same letters an early scribe would have used for those sounds.
Why does the result start and end with ᚛ and ᚜?
Those are the feather marks, Unicode U+169B and U+169C, which stand for the arrowhead-shaped marks that show where an inscription begins and ends along the stem line. Without them a string of ogham has no visible stem and no clear start. Words inside are separated by the ogham space mark, U+1680, a gap in the stem, rather than an ordinary space. The decoder ignores both when reading back.
Why does the text read left to right when stones read upward?
Unicode defines the Ogham block as left-to-right text, matching the horizontal way medieval manuscripts wrote it, and browsers lay it out that way. A stone is read from the bottom of the left edge upward. The two are the same sequence of letters; rotate the result a quarter turn counterclockwise and you have the order of a stone. Some fonts draw the stem line through the letters so that it joins up either way.
What happens to letters ogham does not have, such as k, v, w and y?
Each is written with the letter for its nearest sound, following the usual charts: k joins c on coll ᚉ, v and w join f on fearn ᚃ (which stood for a w-like sound in early Irish), j and y join i on idad ᚔ, and x is written as the two letters ᚉᚄ. When decoding, the tool cannot tell which of the shared letters was typed, and returns k, f and i.
Is ogham really a tree alphabet?
Only partly. Some letter names are trees, beith birch, fearn alder, sail willow, coll hazel, dair oak, and the medieval Auraicept na nÉces explained all the names as trees, which is where the tree alphabet idea and the later "Celtic tree calendar" come from. Scholars today take most of the names as ordinary words, and the tree calendar is a 20th-century invention. The letters themselves are a practical alphabet, and this tool treats them as one.
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