meaning – OG(H)AM

What does the word ogam mean and where does the name come from?

By David Stifter, OG(H)AM’s Irish Principal Investigator In my blog in December 2021, I talked about the different ways of spelling and pronouncing the word Ogam or ogham. In this blog entry, I will resume this discussion of the word itself and I will look into what the word may originally have referred to, before… Continue reading What does the word ogam mean and where does the name come from?

Since some of the OG(H)AM team will be heading Stateside in early March to share our findings with colleagues in Boston, it seems timely to feature an Ogam of the Month with a US connection. The manuscript now known as ‘Dunnington 1’, bequeathed to the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 2017 by the late Professor Edgar Slotkin of the University of Cincinnati, was one of two Irish manuscripts purchased by Mr Michael Dunnington in Lexington, Kentucky during the early 1980s. At the end of the manuscript, some ogam script was written alongside several doodles. The first ten symbols should probably be transcribed as PATTMULLER. These are followed by an eleventh symbol of doubtful value, shaped a little bit like a lozenge. The significance of this little scrap of ogam script is uncertain: could it be the name of someone once associated with or in possession of the manuscript, or is it merely more doodling on the part of the scribe?