Straif
The fourth letter of the M group, four strokes slanting across the stem line. The manuscripts give it z or st and call it blackthorn; its name means sulphur, and its first sound is unknown.
Meaning
Straif is four strokes slanting across the line. Its sound is the least certain in the alphabet: medieval scholars wrote it as Z and as SD or ST, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project note, and Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, suggests st or sw, which had become plain s by the Old Irish period. Both read the name as “sulphur”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+168E OGHAM LETTER STRAIF.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces makes it the blackthorn, “the hedge of a stream”, and In Lebor Ogaim the sloe. Its Word Ogham kenning, “strongest of red”, is explained by the sloe’s dye: “in the sloe red for dyeing the things is stronger”. Hayden and Stifter point out that the usual word for the sloe is draigen, and that some medieval sources already explain straif as sraib, “sulphur”, which they call “undoubtedly the correct explanation”.
Z, a letter Irish did not need
The manuscripts’ Z is one of three letters, with H and NG, that McManus calls “cosmetic and Latin-based”. The Heritage Council’s guide says these three “rarely occur on ogham stones”, and Ogham in 3D that their first values cannot be fixed with certainty. Encyclopaedia Britannica takes the letters for h and z, “which are not used in Irish”, as evidence against a purely Irish origin for the script.
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 OghamRuisThe 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.
- 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; Origins
- 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. 277, 281, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Straif
- Ogham Stones in Ireland, Nora White, Our Ancient Landscapes: Ogham Stones in Ireland (2021), The Heritage Council, p. 10, Ogham alphabet and letter names
- Ogham writing (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Britannica Editors, “ogham writing”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 2025), Introduction
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+168E
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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