| Digital Resources for Irish |
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Corpas na Gaeilge / The Corpus of Irish, a website providing access to a database of Irish comprising some 100m words. Produced by Dublin City University. For more information on this and many of the other Irish corpus projects listed here go to www.gaois.ie. | corpas.ie |
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An Bunachar Náisiúnta Téarmaíochta don Ghaeilge / The National Terminology Database for Irish. Hosted by Dublin City University. | tearma.ie |
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A website about the new Concise English-Irish Dictionary published by Foras na Gaeilge in 2020 (see below for more information). | www.focloir.ie |
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The Dictionary and Language Library, a website providing access to the main Irish-English and English-Irish dictionaries as well as a grammar and pronunciation database. | teanglann.ie |
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This is a digitised form of the Ó Dónaill Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin, 1977) with all the headwords and approximately 25% of the syntactic material in the entries. It has not been adapted to later versions of Windows since its appearance in the early 2000s. | Available as a CD-ROM. |
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Dúchas / Heritage, a website with information on collections of Irish and Irish speakers. Hosted by Dublin City University. | duchas.ie |
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A national biographical database of Irish persons. Hosted by Dublin City University. | ainm.ie |
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A store of recordings of Irish from various locations around the island of Ireland. Hosted by Dublin City University. | canuint.ie |
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The Doegen recordings are named after the German scholar Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967) who came to Ireland in 1928 together with his assistant Karl Tempel. They made recordings of traditional speakers in many regions where Irish is no longer spoken natively today (Tempel did further recordings during stays in 1930 and 1931). These recordings have been digitised by the Royal Irish Academy. | www.ria.ie/collections/archival-collections/doegen-recordings/. Note that the recordings are no longer available online but can be obtained on loan from the library of the Royal Irish Academy. |
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A compehensive website with extensive information about the names of thousands of localities in Ireland. Hosted by Dublin City University. | logainm.ie |
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This historical corpus consists of words and phrases in a range of over 3000 texts published in Irish between 1600 and 1926. Hosted by the Royal Irish Academy. | corpas.ria.ie |
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A very useful website, created and maintained by Michal Měchura, which consists of a bilingual dictionary. It provides access to a number of glossaries, a thesaurus and a dictionary of Irish verbs, along with many relevant internet links. | potafocal.com |
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This is a study of the language of native speakers from the different regions of the Gaeltacht. Their language is discussed using extracts from their speech (as sound files) illustrating various aspects of the different dialects of Irish in present-day Ireland. | A DVD with hundreds of recordings comes with the book. The DVD also contains software with which you can listen to all the recordings in a well-organised and structured fashion. |
| Digital Resources for Irish English |
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General information on resources for the study of and research into Irish English can be found on the Irish English Network website, hosted by the University of Lüneburg, Germany, and maintained by Anne Barron. The Irish English Resource Centre website, created and maintained by Raymond Hickey, also contains much information relevant to Irish English; for specific information on Dublin English, see Variation and Change in Dublin English. |
https://www.irish-english.net/resources/ https://www.uni-due.de/IERC/ https://www.uni-due.de/VCDE/ |
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The International Corpus of English, frequently abbreviated to ICE, consists of corpora of English in different domains and regions of the anglophone world, documenting the use of the language world-wide. There is an Irish sub-corpus in this project, compiled by Jeffrey Kallen (Trinity College Dublin) and John Kirk (Queen’s University, Belfast) and published as a CD-ROM in 2008. To access this corpus, please contact the main site for ICE at the University of Zurich.
A prosodically and pragmatically annotated version of the ICE-Ireland corpus is also available, called SPICE-Ireland (go to https://johnmkirk.etinu.net/cgi-bin/generic?instanceID=11). |
https://www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en/access.html |
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The Limerick Corpus of Irish English is a one-million word corpus of English as it is spoken in Ireland compiled in the early 2000s by colleagues at the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. For copyright reasons, it is not freely available on the internet, but can be accessed on Sketch Engine, go to https://www.sketchengine.eu/limerick-corpus-of-irish-english/. You must have an account (personal or institutional) to use Sketch Engine with the Limerick Corpus of Irish English and you must agree to their processing your personal data. Note also that Sketch Engine involves costs which must be covered to allow access to the corpora they hold. | https://dspace.mic.ul.ie/handle/10395/1696 |
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A Corpus of Irish English gathers together the main documents for the English language in Ireland throughout its history. These begin in the early 14th century and continue up to the present-day. A much extended version is available on the website of the compiler, Raymond Hickey. It comes with flexible software with which to search for data throughout the corpus, allowing the returns to be exported to Excel, R, etc. | http://www.uni-due.de/CP |
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CORVIZ is the acronym of the project 'CORIECOR visualized. Irish English in writing across time (a longitudinal historical perspective)' The aim of the project is to create a publicly accessible, sustainable electronic correspondence corpus, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), so that it can then be used for further research by the wider academic community. | https://corviz.h.uib.no/ |
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Consisting of recordings of over 1,500 persons, the Sound Atlas of Irish English provides illustrations of all the varieties of English spoken throughout Ireland. The speakers read a word list, a text passage and often provided a stretch of free speech. Their ages range from 10 to over 80, cover both genders evenly and encompass both urban and rural varieties of Irish English. | A DVD with the recordings comes with the book. There also contains a software suite, organised by sections and groups, with which you can navigate your way through the recordings and find those which interest you easily. |
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The Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech was a project conducted at the English Department of Queen's University, Belfast, during the 1970s mainly under the leadership of Michael Barry. It is at present curated by National Museums NI, which maintains an extensive sound archive | https://www.nationalmuseumsni.org/sound-archive |
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The Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech resulted from a project which John Kirk, then at Queen's University, Belfast, conducted. The second edition appeared as a CD in 2004, see the link in the column on the right for more information. | https://johnmkirk.etinu.net/cgi-bin/generic?instanceID=2 |
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The Corpus of Irish English Speech This project was initiated by Francesca Nocera, University of Galway, and is projected to continue in the coming years. At present, late 2025, no data from the project is available. |
| Printed Dictionaries for Irish |
There are a number of dictionaries available for Irish. The standard printed works for the modern language are de Bhaldraithe (1957) English-Irish Dictionary and Ó Dónaill (1977) Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla [Irish-English dictionary] along with the older Dinneen (1927 [1924]) Irish-English Dictionary.
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Left: de Bhaldraithe, Tomás (1957). English-Irish Dictionary. Dublin: Oifig an tSoláthair [Stationary Office].
Middle: Ó Dónaill, Niall (1977) Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla [Irish-English dictionary]. Dublin: Oifig an tSoláthair [Stationary Office].
Right: A shortened version of the main Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla published by the Roinn Oideachais [Department of Education].
Dinneen, Patrick S. (1927 [1904]) Foclóir Ghaeilge agus Béarla — Irish-English Dictionary. Dublin: The Irish Texts Society.
There is currently an on-going project to digitise this dictionary in which the French lexicographer Julianne Nyhan is involved as well as the coordinator of the Corpus of Electronic Texts (Celt), Beatrix Färber. Information on the project is available on the CELT website at the following address: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/digineen.html.
In 2020 the Concise English-Irish Dictionary was published by Foras na Gaeilge under the principal editorship of Pádraig Ó Mianáin, which can be seen as a modern successor to de Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary (1957) (website: www.focloir.ie). In the course of the compilation of the new dictionary, the two previous standard works, de Bhaldraithe (1957) and Ó Dónaill (1977), were digitised and their content is now available online at teanglann.ie.
2020. Concise Irish-English Dictionary, ed. Pádraig Ó Mianáin et al. Dublin: Foras na Gaeilge.
Smaller dictionaries
Aimed at second-language learners, some compact dictionaries have come on the market, e.g. Mac Mathúna and Ó Corráin (1997) Collins Pocket Irish Dictionary, Ó Cróinín (2000) Oxford Pocket Irish Dictionary.
Left: Mac Mathúna, Séamus and Ó Corráin, Ailbhe (1997) Collins Pocket Irish Dictionary
Right: Breandán Ó Cróinín (2005) Collins Irish Dictionary, Revised edition.
Ó Cróinín, Breandán (2000) Oxford Pocket Irish Dictionary
There are also two dictionaries by the government department, An Gúm: Foclóir Póca and Foclóir Scoile.
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Left: An Gúm: Foclóir Póca
Right: An Gúm: Foclóir Scoile
Irish-English, English-Irish Dictionary. Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland.
Other lexicographical works
Doyle, Aidan and Edmund Gussmann 1996. A Reverse Dictionary of Modern Irish. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Folium.
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Left: Ó Ruairc, Maolmhaodhóg 1996. Díolaim d’Abairtí Dúchasacha. [An anthology of native sayings] Dublin: An Gúm.
Right: Ó Doibhlin, Breandán 2008. Gaoth an Fhocail. Foclóir analógach. [The suggestion of the word (lit.). An analogical dictionary]. Second edition. Dublin: Coiscéim and Sáirséal Ó Marcaigh.
Historical works
To date (late 2025) there is no dictionary of modern Irish with etymological information. To trace the meaning of a word through history one must use the Dictionary of the Irish Language (published by the Royal Irish Academy) which is based on Old and Middle Irish material. However, there is a modern Irish index for this dictionary, de Bhaldraithe (1981). Alternatively, one could consult the etymological dictionary by Vendryes (1959-78) Lexique étymologique de l’irlandais ancien which, unfortunately, remains incomplete.
Left: 1990. Dictionary of the Irish Language. Based Mainly on Old and Middle Irish Materials. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy.
Right: de Bhaldraithe, Tomás 1981. Innéacs Nua-Ghaeilge don Dictionary of the Irish Language. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy.
As of Summer 2007 the Dictionary of the Irish language has been available online in a searchable form. To access this, use the following link.
Dictionaries of the Irish language go back some considerable time. By the middle of the 19th century an English-Irish dictionary was available for those studying the Irish language.
1855. Daniel Foley’s English-Irish Dictionary.
In addition to the above dictionaries there is an unfinished etymological dictionary of the Irish language, begun by the French Celtologist Joseph Vendryes (1875-1960) and partially completed by his compatriots Édouard Bachallery and Pierre-Yves Lambert. Seven volumes have already been published, covering the following letters: 1: A; 2: M, N, O, P; 3: R, S; 4: T, U; 5: B; 6: C; 7: D).
| Printed Dictionaries for Irish English |
| Further material on language in Ireland |
| References |
There are a number of handbooks with chapters covering large areas of concerning corpus linguistics and languages in Ireland. Below are listed two handbooks/overview volumes for corpus linguistics and some others covering Irish and Irish English.
Corpus linguistics
Left: O’Keeffe, Anne and Michael J. McCarthy (eds) 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Second edition. London: Routledge.
Right: Biber, Douglas and Randi Reppen (eds) 2015. The Cambridge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Left: O'Sullivan, Joan 2020. Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change. London: Routledge.
Right: Amador-Moreno, Carolina P. 2019. Orality in Written Texts: Using Historical Corpora to Investigate Irish English 1700-1900. Abingdon: Routledge.
Irish and Celtic linguistics
Left: Ball, Martin and Nicole Müller (eds) 2010. The Celtic Languages. Second edition. London: Routledge.
Right: Eska, Joseph, Silva Nurmio, Peader Ó Muircheartaigh and Paul Russell (eds) 2026. The Palgrave Handbook of Celtic Languages and Linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
See also the Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Irish English linguistics
Left: Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2024. The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Right: Barron, Anne, Yueguo Gu and Gerad Steen (eds) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London: Routledge.
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Raymond Hickey
November 2025
(email author of website)
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