Write Your Name in Ogham: Ireland’s Ancient Alphabet
Ogham is the earliest writing in Ireland: strokes carved into standing stones over 1,500 years ago. Here's how it works, why the letters are named after trees, and how to write your own name in it.
Long before the Latin alphabet reached Ireland, the Irish were already writing, in a script unlike anything else in Europe. Ogham (pronounced OH-am) is Ireland's earliest known alphabet: a run of simple strokes carved along the edge of a standing stone, climbing from the bottom upward. More than 400 of these Ogham stones still survive, most of them in the south-west of the country.
How Ogham works
Every Ogham letter is just a group of one to five strokes set against a central line called the druim ("ridge" or "spine"). Where the strokes sit, and which way they lean, tells you which letter it is. The twenty original letters, the feda, fall into four neat families of five, the aicmí:
- Aicme Beithe: B, L, F, S, N (strokes to one side of the line)
- Aicme hÚatha: H, D, T, C, Q (strokes to the other side)
- Aicme Muine: M, G, nG, Z, R (strokes slanting across)
- Aicme Ailme: the vowels A, O, U, E, I (strokes straight across)
On a stone, you read from the bottom up, so the first letter of a name sits at ground level.
The tree alphabet
Here's the part people love: each letter has a name, and by tradition those names are trees and plants. Beith is birch, Dair is oak, Coll is hazel, Ruis is elder, and Iodhadh, the letter I, is the yew, long a symbol of endurance. It's why Ogham is sometimes called "the tree alphabet." (The tree associations come from later medieval scholars, so enjoy them as lore rather than hard history. They're still a lovely way to remember the letters.)
Write your own name
We've built a little tool so you can try it yourself: type any name or word and watch it appear in Ogham, stroke by stroke. Flip it into standing-stone view to see it carved vertically the way the originals were, tap any letter to hear its Irish name, and download your name as an image to keep or share.
One honest note: Ogham was designed for the sounds of early Irish, not English, so writing a modern name is really a transliteration, matching each letter to its nearest Ogham sound. It's exactly how the name-stones you'll see in gift shops and museums are made, and a grand way in to a 1,500-year-old tradition.
Bain triail as! Give it a go. 🍀