Gétal
The third letter of the M group, three strokes slanting across the stem line. The manuscripts give it the sound ng and call it broom or reed; it first stood for a gw sound, and its name means slaying.
Meaning
Gétal, often written nGétal, is three strokes slanting across the line. The manuscript key gives it ng, a sound that, like h, never begins a word in Irish. Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, reads the name as “killing, slaying” and its first sound as gw, and holds that the NG, H and Z of the key are “cosmetic and Latin-based”, chosen from the later forms of the names. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project give the etymology as “piercing, wounding”, and point out that a letter for a mutated sound like ng goes against the logic of the alphabet. Unicode encodes it as U+168D OGHAM LETTER NGEADAL, leaving out the n.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces calls it “broom or fern”, with the kenning “a physician’s strength is broom”, which In Lebor Ogaim explains “because it is strength with the physicians”. Medieval scholars also explained it as gilcach, “reed”, Hayden and Stifter add, a word that in Modern Irish can also mean a tweet.
Rare on the stones
The Heritage Council’s guide counts this among three letters that “rarely occur on ogham stones”, which suggests their sounds were already falling out of use; Ogham in 3D says they are “so poorly attested in ogham inscriptions on stone” that their first values cannot be fixed with certainty.
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 OghamStraifThe fourth letter of the M group, four strokes slanting across the stem line. The manuscripts give it z or st and call it blackthorn; its name means sulphur, and its first sound is unknown.
- 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 Muine; Origins
- 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, 281
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, nGétal
- 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 (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168D
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 8, §8.15 Ogham, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 8: Europe-II, Unicode Consortium, 8.15.1, Structure
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 .