Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An alphabetic system of inscribed notches for vowels and lines for consonants used to write Old Irish, chiefly on the edges of memorial stones, from the fifth to the early seventh century.
- n. A character used in this alphabet.
- n. An inscription in the ogham alphabet.
- n. A stone inscribed in the ogham alphabet.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A character belonging to an alphabet of 20 letters used by the ancient Irish and some other Celts in the British islands. An ogham consists of a straight line or a group of straight lines drawn at right angles to a single long stem or main line of writing, and either confined to the one or to the other side of this stem or intersecting it. Some of the lines make an acute angle with the stem. Cnrves rarely occur. The oghams were cut or carved on wood or stone, and some have come down to us in manuscripts. In lapidary oghamic inscriptions the edge of the stone often served as the main stem. Oghams continued to be used till the ninth or tenth century in Ireland as secret characters.
- n. An inscription consisting of such characters.
- n. The system of writing which consisted of such characters.
- n. See the quotation.
Wiktionary
- n. Alternative form of Ogham.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A particular kind of writing practiced by the ancient Irish, and found in inscriptions on stones, metals, etc.
Etymologies
- Irish Gaelic, from Old Irish ogom, after Ogma, name of a Celtic god. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Even if an ogham rosetta could be discovered, they would still have to try and translate the text back into oral pictish, difficult unless it is accepted that the way to understand it is via p-celtic patterns.”
“It's fair to say that no sample of written Pictish that we can read has survived, although as we still can't decipher the symbol stones satisfactorily we can't say whether the symbols, and/or the ogham inscriptions that also haven't been deciphered, represent a form of written Pictish, perhaps a limited sub-set of the language used for particular purposes.”
“The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions (Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic).”
“Surprisingly easy to navigate despite a seeming rush and jumble of information, it introduces guests to a myriad of stone circles, ogham stones, wedge tombs, passage tombs, and stone rows primarily from Western Europe.”
“This embraces a beautiful and perfect round tower, a singularly interesting ruined church commonly called the cathedral, the ruins of a second church beside a holy well, a primitive oratory, a couple of ogham inscribed pillar stones,”
Life of St. Declan of Ardmore and Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore
“(Woden's last words to Balder are famous); the riding round the pyre; the eulogium; the piling of the barrow, which sometimes took whole days, as the size of many existing grass mounds assure us; the funeral feast, where an immense vat of ale or mead is drunk in honor of the dead; the epitaph, like an ogham, set up on a stone over the barrow.”
“They might even refer to the ogham wands on which the first words of their tasks and the opening lines of poems were cut; and it is likely that, being new to these things, they would talk of them to a youngster, and, thinking that his wits could be no better than their own, they might have explained to him how ogham was written.”
“This embraces a beautiful and perfect round tower, a singularly interesting ruined church commonly called the cathedral, the ruins of a second church beside a holy well, a primitive oratory, a couple of ogham inscribed pillar stones, &c., &c.”
“In the exercise of this they made use of wands of yew, upon which they wrote in a secret character called ogham.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 5: Diocese-Fathers of Mercy
“It was eventually superseded by the Roman letters which were introduced by the Church and must have been propagated with all the prestige of the new religion behind them; but isolated ogham inscriptions exist on grave stones erected as late as the year”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘ogham’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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What follows
follow up, track, pursue, tail, keep abreast, chase after, stick with, tagalong, stick to, trail, camp follower, dog and 66 more...
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colleen's words
yellow, green, pie, blue, fur, people, incense, book, brown, avuncular, mountain, fog and 1316 more...
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Under The Kilt
Anything related to Scottish culture, cuisine, language, history and so on. Does not include Gaelic words unless acceptable (roughly speaking!) in a wider sense.
brae, machair, loch, burn, inverness, shieling, camanachd, shinty, diddy, bhoy, ghillie, brownie and 393 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
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M'ogle
As to feature the creature "mog".
cosmogony, transmogrify, glom, golem, mog, mogul, moggy, smog, demogenic, cormogeny, seismograph, primogenitor and 359 more...
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Search phrases by which people were r...
The terms on this list alternately horrify and fascinate me. Marmalade cat humiliation? Who died in Swensen's in Chapel Hill? And just what did go down at that infamous Dickensian Workhouse Fair? <...
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persnickety parlance
behoove, ebullient, insouciant, insipient, froth, quandary, quixotic, tendril, maktub, furrow, furl, anastrophe and 1076 more...
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miscellany
preposterous, minimalism, outnumbered, subroutine, malinger, oddity, eccentricity, laughable, oxymoronic, interstellar, winter, heedless and 335 more...
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pendlerpiken's Words
serendipity, fork, whee, pursuit, squeee, badger, hedge-swaine, wicked, ochre, umbra, verisimilitude, antediluvian and 15 more...
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moving driving words
act, active, actor, actual, actuary, actuate, agendum, agent, agile, agitate, allege, ambage and 47 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for ogham.

fbharjo ogmios og-mo- PIE furrow, track Sep 25, 2012
bilby It's a trinkety kind of day. Dec 4, 2008
johnmperry Celtic tree alphabet:
consonants
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ogham_Con.jpg">
Jul 21, 2008
vowels