The Irish Alphabet & Ogham
Irish has been written in two scripts. The script most readers meet first is the modern Roman alphabet in its traditional eighteen-letter form — the alphabet of every book, road sign, and signpost in Ireland today. The script that came first is Ogham: straight strokes carved along the edges of stones, the earliest known writing system for the Irish language, dating to roughly the fourth to ninth centuries.
The two scripts are different tools for different jobs, but they are continuous in tradition. Many Ogham letter-names — beith, coll, dair, fearn — are also the medieval names of the corresponding Roman letters. A reader who knows one alphabet has already met the other under another name. The two pages below treat each script on its own terms, then point back to where they connect.
The Irish Alphabet
a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u
The eighteen letters of modern written Irish, plus the four foundational concepts that make the alphabet work: the síneadh fada (long mark), broad and slender consonants, and lenition. Includes a clickable grid where every letter opens a Grimoire page of every word beginning with that letter.
Ogham
᚛ᚐᚁᚉᚇᚓᚃᚌᚆᚔᚂᚋᚅᚑᚚᚏᚄᚈᚒ᚜
The earliest writing system for Irish: straight strokes carved along a central line, organised into four aicme (families) of five letters each. Includes the full repertoire, the medieval letter-names and kennings, a clickable Latin↔Ogham widget, ten curated stones from the surviving corpus, and a reverse-drill quiz.
Where the two meet: Each of the eighteen letter pages in the Grimoire shows the modern letter, its medieval Irish letter-name (ailm, beith, coll, …), and its Ogham character side by side, so you can move between scripts the way the tradition itself did.