Coll
The fourth letter of the H group, four strokes to the left of the stem line, for the sound k. Its name, coll, means hazel.
Meaning
Coll is four strokes to the left of the line, the letter for k. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies gives his list, reads the name as “hazel-tree”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project count coll among the names that really are trees. The Heritage Council’s guide names it with beithe and dair as the letters “where the tree-alphabet label comes from”. Unicode encodes it as U+1689 OGHAM LETTER COLL.
Origin and history
The kennings for the hazel are all about the tree. The Auraicept na nÉces gives “fair wood, that is, hazel, i.e., every one is eating of its nuts”; the Word Ogham of Morann in In Lebor Ogaim has “fairest of trees”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc “friend of cracking”.
Twin of hazel
One of the later extra letters is built from this one. Emancholl, “twin coll” in Hayden and Stifter’s words, is coll crossed with itself: In Lebor Ogaim describes it as “c across c in its form”. It is on the Forfeda: ór, uilleann, pín and emancholl page.
On the stones
C is in two formula words on the stones, MUCOI, “posterity, tribe”, which names a kin group’s ancestor, and CELI, “companion, client”, 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 OghamCertThe 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.
- 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
Forfeda: ór, uilleann, pín and emancholl, Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin.
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, 279, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §1, Coll; §4, Emoncholl
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 10, Ogham alphabet and letter names
- 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+1689
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
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