Muin
The first letter of the M group, one stroke slanting across the stem line, for the sound m. The medieval tracts call it the vine; Damian McManus reads the name as the upper back or neck.
Meaning
Muin heads the third group, Aicme Muine, whose letters cross the line on the slant: the Auraicept na nÉces calls them “athwart of stem”. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises him, reads the name as “upper part of back, neck”, and the Heritage Council’s guide to ogham stones gives muin, “neck”, as one of the names that are “quite clearly not trees”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+168B OGHAM LETTER MUIN.
Origin and history
The Auraicept makes it a vine, “highest of beauty”, “because it grows aloft”. The kennings in In Lebor Ogaim keep the other sense. The Word Ogham of Morann’s “strongest of effort” is explained by the “identity of name with muin, back of man or ox”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc glosses its kenning simply as “a man’s back”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project find “no actual evidence” for the vine, and list the real Old Irish words muin: “love, affection”, “neck” or “treachery”.
On the stones
M begins the two commonest formula words: MAQI, “son”, and MUCOI, “descendant, kindred”, which is followed by the name of the kin group’s ancestor, the Heritage Council’s guide explains.
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 OghamGortThe 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.
- 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, pp. 75, 93; In Lebor Ogaim, pp. 279, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Muin
- 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. 12, Contents of ogham inscriptions
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168B
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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