Forfeda: ór, uilleann, pín and emancholl
The extra letters added to ogham’s twenty: ór, uilleann, pín and emancholl, with ébad and the late peith. They belong to the manuscripts far more than to the stones.
Meaning
The forfeda, “extra letters”, are a fifth group added to the twenty. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls them “seemingly a later development”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project say they “seem to have been intended to represent sounds that were felt to be missing from the alphabet”, the letter for p among them, since Irish at first had none, as the Heritage Council’s guide notes. Only the first, Ébad, is frequent on the stones; the rest live in the manuscripts. Unicode encodes six: éabhadh, ór (U+1696), uilleann (U+1697), ifín (U+1698), eamhancholl (U+1699) and peith (U+169A).
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces gives them trees like the others: ór the “spindle-tree, or ivy”, uilleann “honeysuckle”, iphin “gooseberry, or thorn”. Their kennings in In Lebor Ogaim are “most venerable of structures” for ór, “great equal-length” for uilleann and “expression of a weary one” for emancholl.
What the names mean
Hayden and Stifter take them one by one. Ór means “gold”, from Latin aurum, and “not even the stoutest arborologists tried to find a floral meaning for this”. Uilleann means “elbow”, and the Auraicept’s honeysuckle “looks suspiciously contrived”. Pín is probably from Latin pinus, pine; In Lebor Ogaim agrees, “pine, again, in the forest”, and gives ifín as its other name. Emancholl, “twin coll”, describes its own shape, two Colls overlaid at a right angle, or as In Lebor Ogaim puts it, “c across c in its form”. Peith, the late letter for p, was made from the younger form of the name Beithe by turning its b into p.
The drawing
The drawing shows ór, a lozenge on the line, above emancholl, a grid on coll’s side of it, after the Unicode chart. Uilleann, pín and peith are not drawn.
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 OghamDruim: the stem lineThe line the ogham letters stand on: on the stones it is the edge where two faces meet, and in manuscripts a drawn line. Its Irish name, druim, means ridge, edge or back.
- The same shape in Buddhist symbolsEndless knotA knot of interlaced lines with no beginning or end, one of the eight auspicious symbols. Tibetan teachers read it as the union of wisdom and compassion.
See also
Coll, Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin.
Sources
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1695–U+169A, Forfeda (supplementary letters)
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §4, the forfedae; introduction
- 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, 283, 285, 289
- 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: the forfeda
- 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 writing (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Britannica Editors, “ogham writing”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 2025), Introduction
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from diamonds, 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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