Dair
The second letter of the H group, two strokes to the left of the stem line, for the sound d. Its name, dair, means oak.
Meaning
Dair is two strokes to the left of the line. It is one of the letter names that really is a tree: Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies gives his list, reads it as “oak-tree”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project record the older form daur. The Heritage Council’s guide to ogham stones names beithe, dair and coll as the letters “where the tree-alphabet label comes from”. Unicode encodes it as U+1687 OGHAM LETTER DAIR.
Origin and history
The medieval tracts rank the oak high. The Auraicept na nÉces quotes the Word Ogham of Morann, “higher than bushes is an oak”, and In Lebor Ogaim puts oak among its eight “chieftain trees”. The Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc calls it “carpenter’s work”.
On the stones
D is in the kin name DOVINIAS, “descendants of (goddess) Duibne”, on stones in west Kerry, the earlier form of the barony name Corca Dhuibhne, and in LUGUDECCAS on the stone at Ardmore in County Waterford, as the Heritage Council’s guide 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 OghamTinneThe third letter of the H group, three strokes to the left of the stem line, for the sound t. The medieval tracts call it holly; the word was the Old Irish for a bar of metal, an ingot.
- 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 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. 91; In Lebor Ogaim, pp. 275, 279, 285
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §1, Dair
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 10, Ogham alphabet and letter names; pp. 12–14
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1687
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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