Gort
The second letter of the M group, two strokes slanting across the stem line, for the sound g. The medieval tracts call it ivy; the word means a field.
Meaning
Gort is two strokes slanting across the line. Its name is an ordinary word: Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, gives “field”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project “field, territory”. The Heritage Council’s guide to ogham stones gives gort, with muin, as a name “quite clearly” not a tree. Unicode encodes the letter as U+168C OGHAM LETTER GORT.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces makes gort the ivy, with the kenning “greener than pastures is ivy”, and In Lebor Ogaim also offers the fir. The kenning of the Word Ogham of Morann gives the field away: “sweeter than grasses” is explained by “the identity of the name with the cornfield. When it is in the blade, sweeter than any grass is that grass, to wit, the cornfield.” In Lebor Ogaim even glosses the letter as “gort, cornfield, g”.
On the stones
G is in LUGUDECCAS on the stone at Ardmore, County Waterford, whose later forms the Heritage Council’s guide follows down to Luigdech, and in VOTECORIGAS on a stone in Wales (CIIC 358). That stone has the same name in Latin letters, MEMORIA VOTEPORIGIS PROTICTORIS, and Ogham in 3D, after Damian McManus, takes it for Guo(r)tepir, king of Dyfed, who died in the mid sixth century. It is the one reliable identification McManus gives from a British inscription.
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 OghamGétalThe 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.
- 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
- 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, §2, Gort
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 10, Ogham alphabet and letter names; p. 14, Dating ogham stones
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham: Identification of names
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168C
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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