The Authentic Orthography
Ọrúnmìlà
Wisdom, Divination, Ifá · Heaven knows who will succeed
The Authentic Orthography
Wisdom, Divination, Ifá · Heaven knows who will succeed
Unicode restoration and ASCII comparison
Ọrúnmìlà
The name survives only in scholarly transliteration. Ọrúnmìlà is the standard Yoruba romanisation, documented in academic sources — “Heaven knows who will succeed”. Its acute stress marks preserve distinctions lost in plain ASCII.
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual yoruba names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
orunmila
Reduced to plain orunmila, the name loses everything that made it specific: acute stress marks. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Ọrúnmìlà
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Ọrúnmìlà restores acute stress marks, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Ọrúnmìlà.com → xn--rnml-3na4exes761a.com
The non-ASCII characters in Ọrúnmìlà are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Ọrúnmìlà.
How Ọrúnmìlà is preserved in writing
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual yoruba names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
Contribute scholarly provenance →How Ọrúnmìlà was spoken
Attributes of Ọrúnmìlà
The arts of writing, strategy, medicine, and memory.
Wisdom that sees through deception and chooses the better path.
Stories of Ọrúnmìlà
Shrines, festivals, and votive offerings across the yoruba world invoked Ọrúnmìlà as wisdom, divination, ifá. Worshippers did not simply tell stories about this power; they enacted it through sacrifice, song, and the careful observance of ritual. The name was a password: to speak it correctly was to align oneself with the force it named.
Poets and priests wove Ọrúnmìlà into hymns, genealogies, and mythic narratives. Whether as a major protagonist or a background power, the name carried a charge that later authors returned to again and again. Each retelling adjusted the portrait, but the core identity — wisdom, divination, ifá — remained recognizable.
After the temples fell silent, the name lived on in language, art, and the names of places and stars. It entered classical education, romantic poetry, and modern fantasy. To restore Ọrúnmìlà in Unicode is not nostalgia; it is the recognition that a name with this much history still has work to do.
The lore you have read is the surface — the living myth. Beneath it lies the scholarship: etymology, reconstructed pronunciation, Unicode character breakdown, and the cultural legacy of Ọrúnmìlà.
Enter Extended Lore