Idad
The fifth vowel of ogham, five notches or strokes across the stem line, for the sound i. The medieval tracts call it the yew; the name may be an artificial partner to edad.
Meaning
Idad closes the twenty letters with five notches on the edge, or five short strokes across the line. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises him, calls the name unclear, possibly made as a pair with Edad. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1694 OGHAM LETTER IODHADH, the modern Irish spelling.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces gives “yew”, and In Lebor Ogaim the service tree; the Word Ogham kennings are “oldest of woods” (Morann) and “most withered of wood” (Mac ind Óc).
A yew that lost its letter
Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project think the letter’s first name may really have meant yew. But in Old Irish that word became éo, and so it would no longer do as a name for I. Or idad may be “just as artificial as its partner edad, whichever came first”.
On the stones
I ends three common formula words, MAQQI, “son”, AVI, “grandson, descendant”, and KOI, “here”, 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 OghamÉbadAn extra letter of ogham, two strokes crossing on the stem line in an X. It is the only one of the extra letters common on the stones, where it stands for k, and in late inscriptions for e.
- The medieval tracts call idad the yew, the tree eihwaz is named afterEihwazA rune of the Elder Futhark named for the yew tree. Its sound in the oldest inscriptions is uncertain, perhaps a vowel between e and i.
See also
Edad, 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 Ailme
- 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, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §3, Idad
- 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+1694
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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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