Write your name in ogham

Scholars say

Ogham is the early Irish alphabet cut on the edges of standing stones, in strokes and notches along a stemline. The stones are mostly names, often with the name of a father or ancestor: ogham was an alphabet for marking who someone was and whose they were, which is close to the business of the law.

How to read it

The stones are read from the bottom up. There are four groups of five letters. Strokes to the right of the stemline are b, l, f, s, n; strokes to the left are h, d, t, c, q; strokes slanting across it are m, g, ng, z, r; and short notches across it are the vowels a, o, u, e, i. The number of strokes gives the letter within its group.

The tool turns k into c and v into f, because that is how Old Irish spelling treated those sounds. It leaves a gap for j, p, w, x and y, which ogham had no sign for. It writes ng as two letters, n and g, although the alphabet has a single sign for it. Letter shapes follow the usual modern reading of the stones (see R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, and Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam, 1991). We have not yet checked every sign against those books.