NGéadal
nGéadal is the Irish name of the thirteenth letter of the Ogham alphabet, ᚍ.
The Bríatharogam 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 " 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 gʷhen- 'to pierce, to strike'. Its original phonetic value in Primitive Irish was, the voiced labiovelar. In Old Irish, this phoneme merged with g, and the medieval manuscript tradition assigns it Latin ng, hence the unetymological spelling of the letter name with initial n-.