Sail
The fourth letter of ogham, four strokes to the right of the stem line, for the sound s. Its name, sail, means willow.
Meaning
Sail is four strokes to the right of the line, the fourth letter of the B group. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies gives his list, reads the name as “willow-tree”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project agree; they add that the word may have come into the Celtic languages as “a loan from a pre-Indo-European language”. It is one of the letter names where the medieval tree reading and modern scholarship meet. Unicode encodes it as U+1684 OGHAM LETTER SAIL.
Origin and history
The medieval kennings for the willow are odd ones. The Word Ogham of Morann, quoted in the Auraicept na nÉces, calls it “the colour of a lifeless one”, and the commentator explains that this is “owing to the resemblance of its hue to a dead person”. The Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc, in In Lebor Ogaim, is kinder: “activity of bees”, for the willow’s bloom and catkins.
Four strokes near the top of the tallest stone
The tallest ogham stone, 4.7 metres high at Ballycrovane (Faunkill and the Woods) in County Cork, reads MAQI DECCEDDAS AVI TURANIAS, “of Mac Deichet, descendant of Tornae”. Nora White of the OG(H)AM project noticed that near the top “the five N and final four S strokes begin to curve away from the angle to the right, as if the carver was having difficulty reaching any higher”. Those last four strokes are this letter, ending TURANIAS.
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 OghamNinThe 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.
- 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, 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. 279, 285
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §1, Sail
- 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)
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1684
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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