Tinne
The third letter of the H group, three strokes to the left of the stem line, for the sound t. The medieval tracts call it holly; the word was the Old Irish for a bar of metal, an ingot.
Meaning
Tinne is three strokes to the left of the line. The medieval key makes it the holly, but Damian McManus, in the summary of the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, gives the name’s meaning as “bar, rod of metal, ingot”. Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project agree and add a second ordinary meaning of the word, “salted pig, flitch of bacon”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1688 OGHAM LETTER TINNE.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces explains the holly through a kenning: “a third of a wheel is holly, that is, because holly is one of the three timbers of the chariot-wheel”. In Lebor Ogaim wavers between “holly or elderberry”, and Hayden and Stifter say that two unrelated plants for one name “should raise suspicion”; the Old Irish for holly is cuilenn, and for elder tromm. The Word Ogham of Morann’s kenning, trian, had already lost its sense for the medieval glossator, who wrote that its meaning was “another thing” in his own day.
An ingot
The metal sense was not forgotten. In Lebor Ogaim glosses the kenning for Ruis, tinnem ruccae, as “an ingot of a blush”.
On the stones
T is in QRIMITIR, “priest”, from Latin presbyter, on the Arraglen stone in County Kerry (CIIC 145), as Ogham in 3D records. At Monataggart in County Cork the carver confused the B and H groups, the OG(H)AM project found, and cut T for V: three strokes on the left where Fern needs them on the right.
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 OghamCollThe fourth letter of the H group, four strokes to the left of the stem line, for the sound k. Its name, coll, means hazel.
- 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
Fern, Beithe, Luis, 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 hÚatha
- 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. 277, 279, 281, 285
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Tinne
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham: Content
- 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, March 2025: Monataggart
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1688
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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