NGéadal

nGéadal is the Irish name of the thirteenth letter of the Ogham alphabet, Unicode|ᚍ.

The "Bríatharogam" (kennings) for the letter are:
*"lúth lego" "sustenance of a leech"
*"étiud midach" "raiment of physicians"
*"tosach n-échto" "beginning of slaying"

Its meaning is probably " [the act of] wounding". In Old Irish, the letter name was Gétal. It may be a verbal noun of "gonid" 'wounds, slays'. in which case is related to Welsh "gwanu" 'to pierce, to stab', which comes from the root was *"PIE|gʷhen-" 'to pierce, to strike'. Its original phonetic value in Primitive Irish was [IPA|gʷ] , the voiced labiovelar. In Old Irish, this phoneme merged with "g" (gort), and the medieval manuscript tradition assigns it Latin "ng" [IPA|ŋ] , hence the unetymological spelling of the letter name with initial "n-".

References

*Damian McManus, "Irish letter-names and their kennings", Ériu 39 (1988), 127-168.