The Manx word for a household is lught-thie, literally “house-folk”. It is a good place to start, because it shows how much of this vocabulary is built from plain parts rather than borrowed whole.
Every entry carries its pronunciation in the International Phonetic Alphabet, a plain English approximation, and the source it is attested in. [H] marks a form attested in the historical record. Where a pronunciation is marked not yet sourced, no dictionary we hold records it and we would rather leave the gap visible than invent one. See The Manx Alphabet and Pronunciation for why guessing from the spelling does not work.
Family and people
| English | Manx | Pronunciation | English approximation | Attested in | Tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mother | moir | /morʲ/ | “morr”, soft r | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| father | ayr | /ɛːr/ | “air” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| brother | braar | /brɛːrʲ/ | “brair” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| sister | shuyr | /ʃuːr/ | “shoor” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| son | mac | /mak/ | “mack” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| daughter | inneen | /iˈnʲiːn/ | “in-YEEN” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| child, baby | lhiannoo | /lʲanu/ | “LYAN-oo” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| woman, wife | ben | /ben/ | “ben” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| man, male | fer | /fer/ | “fair” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| husband | dooinney-poost | not yet sourced | — | Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| companion, partner | sheshey | /ʃeʃə/ | “SHESH-uh” | Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| grandmother | mwarree · moirree | /mwari/ | “MWAR-ee” | Cregeen 1835 · Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| grandfather | jishag mooar | not yet sourced | — | Cregeen 1835 · Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| forefather, ancestor | shennayr | not yet sourced | — | Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| family, household | lught-thie | not yet sourced | — | Cregeen 1835 · Kelly 1866 | [H] |
Three words that are not what they look like
These entries were wrong on this page until we checked them against Kelly’s dictionary of 1866. They are worth spelling out, because each shows a different way a translation can mislead.
- Husband is not dooinney. Dooinney on its own simply means “man”. The attested word for a husband is dooinney-poost, literally a “married man”.
- Nor is it sheshey. Kelly glosses sheshey as “a companion, a partner, a fellow, a match, an equal”. It is a partner of any kind, not a spouse specifically, and Kelly’s sheshey-ben means a wife.
- Grandfather is not shennayr. Kelly gives shennayr as “a forefather, a predecessor”, an ancestor rather than a grandparent, with shennayr-vooar for a great-grandfather. The word for grandfather is jishag mooar, literally “big daddy”, and both Cregeen and Kelly agree on it.
None of these were guesses in the first place. They came from a real dictionary. They were still wrong, because a one-word gloss carries less than it appears to, and because the obvious modern form is not always the attested one. Checking them against a second historical dictionary is what caught it.
More than one word for family
Beside lught-thie, Kelly records sluight, sheeloghe and clein, which reach toward lineage, generation and kindred rather than the people currently under one roof. Manx, like Irish, distinguishes the household from the bloodline more readily than English does.
⚠️ Pronunciations are still open for dooinney-poost, jishag mooar, shennayr and lught-thie. None of the dictionaries we hold record pronunciation; these wait on Kneen’s Pronouncing Dictionary (1938) or on native-speaker recordings.