Nin
The fifth letter of ogham, five strokes to the right of the stem line, for the sound n. The medieval tracts make it the ash tree; the word itself means “letters”, or a fork or part of a loom.
Meaning
Nin closes the B group with five strokes to the right of the line, and the medieval tracts name the whole alphabet after the first three letters: the Bethe Luis Nin. Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, calls the etymology unclear, but the word has “the specific meaning ‘letter n’ and the general meaning ‘letters’”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project give its conventional meaning as “part of a weaver’s loom, fork”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1685 OGHAM LETTER NION.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces wants a tree and finds the ash, for “of it are made the spear-shafts by which the peace is broken”: the Word Ogham of Morann calls nin “a check on peace”. The commentator offers a gentler second reading, that nin is part of a weaver’s beam, which is made of ash, and “in time of peace weavers’ beams are raised”. Hayden and Stifter point out that the ash already has a letter of its own, Onn, and that its usual Old Irish word is uinnius.
Five strokes
Nin has the most strokes in its group, and the Auraicept counts by it: “one stroke up to five strokes, ut est, b one only, n five of them”. Near the top of the 4.7-metre stone at Ballycrovane in County Cork, Nora White of the OG(H)AM project found “the five N and final four S strokes” curving away from the edge, as if the carver could not reach higher. At Monataggart in the same county the carver put strokes on the wrong side and cut N for Q: five strokes on the right, where Cert has five on the left.
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 OghamÚathThe first letter of the H group, one stroke to the left of the stem line. The manuscripts give it the sound h and call it the whitethorn; what it first stood for is unknown, and its name may mean fear.
- 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
Cert, Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Dair.
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, pp. 75, 91; In Lebor Ogaim, p. 275
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Nin; §1, Onn
- Og(h)am of the Month, OG(H)AM project team (Nora White, Patricia O’Connor, David Stifter and others), 2021–2025, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, August 2023: Faunkill and the Woods (Ballycrovane); March 2025: Monataggart
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1685
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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