The Irish Language Grimoire
A grimoire is a book of spells. Words are spells when said with feeling and intention. The Irish Language Grimoire is our living reference for Gaeilge: the sounds, the shapes, the grammar, the dialects, the names, and the sacred vocabulary that carry the language forward when a fluent speaker says them aloud.
Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla cliste.
Better broken Irish than clever English.
What this is
The Irish Language Grimoire (Leabhar na Gaeilge) is Rosmerta Publishing’s in-house reference for the Irish language. It is a working document. Anyone in our editorial pipeline consults it before publishing a glossary, a pronunciation guide, an Irish-language children’s book, or any volume in the Irish Culture Project. It is the single source of truth for Irish spellings, mutations, fada placement, dialect tags, and the sacred and mythological vocabulary that runs through the medieval texts.
Choose a section below. Each one opens its own page so you can read it without the others crowding the screen.
What is new
34,000+ Irish words. Three-quarters backed by open-data sources (Wiktionary, gaelspell, Tatoeba, eDIL), each with a citation chip you can click to verify.
The translator works in both directions and handles the most common Irish idioms (need, like, love, prefer, in, from). Every translated word carries a confidence pip. See the Bibliography for sources.
New: Words English Can’t Say. 35 curated Irish words — dúchas, meas, seanchaí, geasa, uaigneas, craic — each with a paragraph on what the word actually does.
Why we do this
To restore and preserve endangered, dying, or forgotten languages, so that the magic of its people are not lost to the earth.
That is the why behind Rosmerta Publishing. The Grimoire is how we live it for Irish: the discipline that keeps every translation, every children’s book, every restored medieval volume true to a language still spoken by living people.