Cert
The last letter of the H group, five strokes to the left of the stem line, for a kw sound that later fell together with k. It is the Q of MAQI, “son”, the commonest word on the stones.
Meaning
Cert is five strokes to the left of the line. It stood for kw, a sound Irish later lost, and so it is written Q. Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, reads the name as “bush”, a word that was confused in the Old Irish period with ceirt, “rag”, once the k and kw sounds had fallen together. Unicode encodes the letter as U+168A OGHAM LETTER CEIRT, the modern Irish spelling.
Origin and history
The medieval tracts make it the apple tree. The Auraicept na nÉces explains it by a kenning, “shelter of a hind”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc has “force of the man, to wit, queirt, q, apple tree”, though In Lebor Ogaim also offers the holly. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project find that the word “is never attested in the sense ‘apple-tree’”. Its relatives in Welsh and Cornish, perth, mean a hedge or thicket, and “hedge, bush” may have been the first meaning in Irish too.
On the stones
Q is in the commonest word on the stones, MAQI, “son”, the Modern Irish mac, the Heritage Council’s guide notes, and in QRIMITIR, “priest”, on the Arraglen stone on Mount Brandon in County Kerry. It also helps to date them. On Greenhill I in County Cork the OG(H)AM project takes “the retained Q of QRITTI” as a possible sign of the early sixth century; on a later stone at Monataggart in the same county “the same character (Q) is used for both guttural sounds”, because by then k and kw had fallen together.
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 OghamMuinThe first letter of the M group, one stroke slanting across the stem line, for the sound m. The medieval tracts call it the vine; Damian McManus reads the name as the upper back or neck.
- 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
Nin, Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, 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 hÚatha
- 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, p. 93; In Lebor Ogaim, pp. 277, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §1, Ceirt
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 12, Contents of ogham inscriptions
- Og(h)am of the Month, OG(H)AM project team (Nora White, Patricia O’Connor, David Stifter and others), 2021–2025, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, March 2025: Monataggart; March 2024: Greenhill I
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168A
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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