Ailm
The first vowel of ogham, a single notch or stroke across the stem line, for the sound a. The medieval tracts call it the pine; what the name first meant is unknown.
Meaning
Ailm heads the fourth group, Aicme Ailme, the vowels. On the stones the vowels are notches cut on the edge itself; in the manuscripts, as the Unicode Standard explains, they became short strokes across the line, and the Auraicept na nÉces calls the group “through stem”. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises him, calls the name “doubtful, only attested once as ‘pine-tree’”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1690 OGHAM LETTER AILM.
Origin and history
The Word Ogham kennings in In Lebor Ogaim make the letter a sound. Morann’s, “loudest of groanings”, is explained by what “a man says while groaning in disease, or wondering”; Mac ind Óc’s, “beginning of an answer”, because “the first expression of every human being after his birth is a”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project suggest that the pine may be a pun, the sound of a cry taken for a word for pine.
Pine, or alpha
Hayden and Stifter call the first meaning unknown, perhaps a reworking of the Greek alpha, as beithe may echo beta. The one place the word means a tree is the poem known as King and Hermit, which they suspect may be a learned use of the letter name.
On the stones
A is in the commonest formula words: MAQQI, “son”, AVI, “grandson, descendant”, and ANM, “name”, as Ogham in 3D records.
Write in ogham
stringmash.comOgham translatorWrite English in ogham, the early Irish alphabet of strokes cut along an edge, with the full ogham chart.Read next
- Next in OghamOnnThe second vowel of ogham, two notches or strokes across the stem line, for the sound o. The medieval Auraicept calls it furze; Damian McManus reads the name as the ash tree.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsCǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
See also
Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin, Úath.
Sources
- Ogham in 3D: alphabet, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), letter names after Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (1991) and Ériu 39 (1988), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, alphabet; Letter names, Aicme Ailme
- Auraicept na n-éces: the scholars' primer, George Calder (ed. and trans.), 1917: the Ogham tract from the Book of Ballymote and the Yellow Book of Lecan, with In Lebor Ogaim, John Grant, Edinburgh (Internet Archive), Auraicept, pp. 75, 93; In Lebor Ogaim, pp. 281, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §3, Ailm
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 10, Ogham alphabet and letter names
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 8, §8.15 Ogham, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 8: Europe-II, Unicode Consortium, 8.15.1, Rendering
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham: Content
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1690
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .