Úr
The third vowel of ogham, three notches or strokes across the stem line, for the sound u. The medieval Auraicept calls it heath; its name means earth or soil.
Meaning
Úr is three notches on the edge, or three short strokes across the line. Damian McManus, as the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies summarises him, reads the name as “earth, clay, soil”, and Deborah Hayden and David Stifter of the OG(H)AM project give that or “fresh, new; green”. Unicode encodes the letter as U+1692 OGHAM LETTER UR, without the accent of the Irish úr.
Origin and history
The Auraicept na nÉces makes úr the heath (heather), and In Lebor Ogaim the thorn; Hayden and Stifter note that the usual word for heath is fróech. The kennings point to the soil instead. The Word Ogham of Morann’s “in cold dwellings” is glossed as “the mould of the earth”, and the Word Ogham of Mac ind Óc’s “growing of plants” is explained because “it is uir, the soil of the earth, that causes the growing of the plants that are put into it”.
Three notches or two?
On Greenhill I in County Cork, Macalister in 1945 read the last letter of the name TRENU as U. The OG(H)AM project could find only two notches, which would make it O, but there is room on the edge for the third.
On the stones
U is in MUCOI, “posterity, tribe”, the formula word that names a kin group’s ancestor, 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 OghamEdadThe fourth vowel of ogham, four notches or strokes across the stem line, for the sound e. The medieval tracts call it the aspen; the name may have no meaning outside the alphabet.
- 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
Onn, Beithe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin.
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 Ailme
- 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, 283, 287
- Ogam and trees, Deborah Hayden and David Stifter, 20 December 2022, OG(H)AM project, University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, §2, Úr
- 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 2024: Greenhill I
- Ogham in 3D: ogham, Ogham in 3D (2013 edition), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ogham: Content
- Ogham (Unicode code chart U+1680–U+169F), The Unicode Standard, code chart for the Ogham block, Unicode Consortium, U+1692
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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