Ogham Alphabet

Ogham (or Ogam) is an ancient alphabet used primarily to write Old Irish and Pictish.

Ogham is mostly represented in the form of marks (letters) composed of strokes oriented relative to a central line, all usually engraved on vertical stones.

The Ogham alphabet is composed of 20 letters, some of which correspond to letters in the classical Latin alphabet.

There are sometimes other rare symbols that appear in manuscripts that are combinations of letters.

It is possible to write English with Ogham letters by substituting the letters with Ogham symbols (but not all letters necessarily have an equivalent).

Here is the list of symbols and the equivalent(s) by transcription in the English alphabet:

The writing is generally vertical from bottom to top but recent adaptation has led to more horizontal writing from left to right.

Ogham reading/translation requires the correspondence between the letters of the alphabet Ogham and our usual Latin alphabet.

The Ogham symbols generally follow a vertical or horizontal line.

The message is composed of bars/sticks, horizontal and vertical lines which are linear and often parallel marks.

Ogham appears to have served primarily for memorial inscriptions on tombstones, where it was used to mark the names of the deceased.

Ogham writing can be vertical (usually top to bottom but sometimes bottom to top) or horizontal (left to right).

The Ogham alphabet is included in the Unicode standard (U+1680 to U+169F), here are the characters:

The symbol ᚛ represents the beginning and ᚜ the end of a sentence or text (but this is not mandatory).

Historians date the Ogham to around the 4th century.