The Irish Language Grimoire — Bibliography
Every entry is sourced. The chip beside each word links to where you can verify it.
34,000+ entries. Three-quarters from open data: Wiktionary, gaelspell, Tatoeba, eDIL.
Foclóir and Teanglann are verification chips, not sources. We don’t copy their definitions.
A note on AI. Some English definitions for rare words were drafted with AI and reviewed editorially.
Found a mistake? Email [email protected].
Modern Irish dictionaries
Foclóir.ie
The modern standard. 50,000 entries with native-speaker audio in three dialects. Visit →
Teanglann.ie
Ó Dónaill (1977), de Bhaldraithe (1959), An Foclóir Beag (1991) on one site. Visit →
Dinneen (1927)
50,000 entries with deep dialect, literary, and Munster coverage the later dictionaries omit. Irish Texts Society.
Open-data sources
The open lexical projects behind three-quarters of our entries.
Wiktionary
17,000 Irish headwords with English definitions, pronunciation, etymology. Visit → CC-BY-SA 3.0.
gaelspell
109,000+ Irish word stems. The Hunspell spell-checker lexicon by Prof. Kevin Scannell. Visit → GPL.
Tatoeba
2,500 Irish–English sentence pairs from volunteer contributors. Visit → CC-BY 2.0.
Apertium
The open-source machine-translation platform. Hand-built bilingual Irish–English dictionary with morphology and POS tags. Visit → GPL.
Wikidata Lexemes
The Wikimedia open knowledge graph’s lexicographic layer. Hand-curated Irish lemmas with English sense glosses, grammatical category, and gender. Visit → CC0 — the most permissive license of any source we use.
FreeDict
The volunteer-built open-dictionary project, active since 1999. Hand-curated Irish–English (1,185 entries) and English–Irish (1,359 entries) TEI dictionaries. Visit → GPL-2.0-or-later.
eDIL — Old/Middle Irish
80,000 headwords covering 700–1700 AD. Royal Irish Academy + QUB. Visit → CC-BY-SA 4.0. Cite as eDIL s.v. focal.
Medieval texts
CELT — Corpus of Electronic Texts
The largest digital library of pre-modern Irish writing. Hosted by UCC, free, open access. Visit CELT →
Lebor Gabála Érenn
How Ireland was peopled, in six invasions from Cessair to the Milesians. Macalister Vol I →
Táin Bó Cúailnge
The Ulster Cycle epic. Medb invades for the Brown Bull while Cú Chulainn defends Ulster alone. CELT →
Acallam na Senórach
The 12th-c. framing-text where the surviving Fianna tell Saint Patrick the place-lore of Ireland. CELT →
Auraicept na nÉces
The medieval Irish grammar and metrics handbook. Preserves the Bríatharogaim kennings for Ogham. CELT →
Senchas Már
The largest body of early Irish Brehon law. 7th–8th century. Ancient Laws Vol I →
Place names
Logainm.ie
The official register of Irish placenames — counties, parishes, townlands, mountains, rivers, holy wells. Visit → © Government of Ireland.
Ogham scholarship
Every Ogham claim on the site is sourced to one of these.
McManus 1991
Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam. The modern scholarly standard. Visit →
Macalister CIIC (1945)
The original Ogham inscription catalogue. CIIC numbers are still the universal reference. Deep-links via Ogham 3D and OG(H)AM.
Stifter 2022
David Stifter, Ogam: Language, Writing, Epigraphy. The newest synthesis, post-Ogham 3D discoveries.
Lowe 2008
Christopher Lowe (ed.), Inchmarnock. The excavation publication with Forsyth’s slate analysis.
Ogham 3D & OG(H)AM
The two open digitisation programmes covering the surviving Ogham corpus. Ogham 3D → · OG(H)AM →
Open-source tooling
The Grimoire runs on open-source code. Credits to the projects we depend on.
An Gramadóir
Kevin Scannell’s open-source Irish grammar checker. GitHub → GPL-2.0.
Caighdean
Kevin Scannell’s pre-standard-to-modern Irish converter (handles ḃ→bh, -uidhe/-idhe reforms). GitHub → GPL-2.0.
Rosmerta editorial
Rosmerta Publishing’s own master Grimoire document. Entries that couldn’t be verified against an external source are honestly marked as Rosmerta editorial.