eDIL - Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language

The electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) is a digital dictionary of medieval Irish. It is based on the ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY’S Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials (1913-1976) which covers the period c.700-c.1700. The current site contains revisions to c.4000 entries and further corrections and additions will be added in the coming years.

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Word of the Week[See More]

AITHBEÓAIGID

AITHBEÓAIGID is an early Irish verb meaning ‘comes back to life’. There is an example of the past tense in the tale of Cairpre mac Feradaig. According to this, Cairpre was killed and his head was cut off, but a cleric, Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, reunited his head with his body ‘co roaithbeōaig Cairbri ō marbaib’ (and so Cairpre came back to life from the dead). The process was not a complete success, however, for Cairpre's neck remained crooked, and afterwards he was known as Cairpre Crom ‘Bent Cairpre’.

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03/11/2017
PELL

PELL ‘a horse’ seems to have been an extremely rare word. Most of the examples we have occur in the phrase DÁ N-Ó PILL ‘two ears of a horse’. This phrase is uttered by a harp in order to expose a disfigurement affecting the character known in Irish tales and pseudo-history as Labraid Lorc or Labraid Loingsech. Before the harp betrayed his secret, Labraid put to death everyone who cut his hair and saw the ears. Although we are never told how Labraid came to have this deformity, his story was perhaps influenced by the legend of the Greek king Midas.

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27/10/2017
SCEOLA

SCEOLA is sometimes translated as ‘survivor’, but the word derives from SCÉL ‘a story’ and the sense is actually closer to ‘one who lives to tell the tale’. Several medieval Irish texts have variations on the saying Ní BI ORGAIN CEN OENSCIULA ‘there is no battle without a SCEOLA’ (Dinds. 52). This can be understood in different ways: it may be intended to mean ‘someone always survives’, but it seems more likely to imply ‘a battle will not be remembered unless someone lives to tell the tale’.

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20/10/2017
CUILEBAD

CUILEBAD is the early Irish word for a flabellum or fan used in religious ceremonies to keep insects away from the priest and from the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ. The fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions stated that the purpose of such a fan was to ‘silently drive away the small animals that fly about’; the Irish perhaps had more sinister aims, for it has been proposed that the word CUILEBAD is made up of CUIL ‘fly’ and BATH ‘death’!

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13/10/2017

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