Luis
The second letter of ogham, two strokes to the right of the stem line, for the sound l. The medieval tracts make it the rowan tree; Damian McManus reads the name as “flame” or “plant”.
Meaning
Luis is the second letter of the B group, two strokes to the right of the line: in the manuscript key, as the Heritage Council’s guide to ogham stones explains, two scores on that side are an L. The medieval Auraicept na nÉces says luis “is named from a tree, to wit, from mountain-ash”, the rowan. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises his work, reads the name instead as luise or loise, “flame, blaze”, or lus, “plant, herb”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1682 OGHAM LETTER LUIS.
Origin and history
The Auraicept backs its tree with a kenning from the Word Ogham of Morann: “delight of eye is mountain-ash, i.e., rowan, owing to the beauty of its berries”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project point out that this is a medieval etymology in the manner of Isidore of Seville, made by splitting the word into lí súla, “delight of eye”, and that such explanations seldom match what historical linguistics finds. The usual Old Irish word for the rowan, they note, is cáerthann. The medieval tracts do not agree among themselves: In Lebor Ogaim makes luis “elm in the forests”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc calls it “friend of cattle, to wit, elm”.
Flame or plant
Hayden and Stifter leave the original meaning open: the name “could either be ‘light, shine’” or “plant, vegetation”, McManus’s two readings again. The first survives in the medieval gloss itself. In Lebor Ogaim explains “delight of eye” as luis, “to wit, the flame”.
On the stones
L begins the name LUGUDECCAS on the ogham stone at Ardmore, County Waterford. The Heritage Council’s guide uses the name to date the stones by the changes in the language: it is LUGUDECA at Kilgrovan and LUGUDEC at Kilmannin, County Mayo, and by the 8th century it had become Luigdech.
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 OghamFernThe third letter of ogham, three strokes to the right of the stem line. Its name, fern, means alder; on the stones it stands for a v sound, which became f in Old Irish.
- 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, Sail, Nin, Úath, Dair, Tinne.
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 Beithe
- 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, 277, 285
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Luis; on the Auraicept’s etymologies
- 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 (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1682
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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