Ruis
The last letter of the M group, five strokes slanting across the stem line, for the sound r. The medieval tracts call it the elder tree; its name means redness.
Meaning
Ruis is five strokes slanting across the line. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises him, reads the name as “red(ness)”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project as “reddening”, the noun from the verb rondaid, “to dye red”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+168F OGHAM LETTER RUIS.
Origin and history
The medieval tracts agree on the elder, and their kennings keep the red. The Auraicept na nÉces gives “the redness of shame is ruis, i.e., elder”; In Lebor Ogaim explains the kenning “intensest of blushes” by a reddening “that grows in a man’s face through the juice of the herb being rubbed under it”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc has “redness of faces”. Here the blush the kennings describe is closer to the name’s real sense than the tree is.
On the stones
R is in QRIMITIR, “priest”, from Latin presbyter, on the Arraglen stone in County Kerry (CIIC 145), and in VOTECORIGAS on a stone in Wales (CIIC 358), 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 OghamAilmThe first vowel of ogham, a single notch or stroke across the stem line, for the sound a. The medieval tracts call it the pine; what the name first meant is unknown.
- 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. 281, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Ruis
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham: Content; Identification of names
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168F
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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