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]

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
SLÍASAIT

SLÍASAIT ‘thigh’ is found in three fine early Irish phrases: (1) TARB SLÍASTA, the ‘bull’ of the thigh, is almost certainly the thickest part, (2) CAIRDES SLÍASTA ‘friendship of the thighs’ is clearly an allusion to sexual intercourse, and (3) ORBA CRUIB ┐ SLÍASTA ‘inheritance of hand and thigh’ seems to mean property which someone has acquired though his or her own efforts and which they can then give to a son or daughter at will. This phrase has attracted attention because it is specifically stated that such property could be passed on by a woman.

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06/10/2017
MIDACH

MIDACH 'physician', oddly enough, turns up in the name for one of the fingers. Legal texts tell us that three scruples must be paid in compensation for injury to or loss of a finger. The only exceptions are the long finger of the right hand and the ‘mér midaig’ of the left hand, each of which is worth nine scruples. ‘Mér midaig’ is obviously based on DIGITUS MEDICUS, the Latin name for the ‘ring-finger’. Why this finger was associated with physicians is not known for certain, but the 6th-/7th-century Archbishop Isidore of Seville claimed it was because physicians applied eye-salve with this finger!

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29/09/2017

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