OR, AN IRISH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY; WHEREOF THE IRISH PART HATH BEEN COMPILED NOT ONLY FROM VARIOUS IRISH VOCABULARIES, BUT ALSO FROM A GREAT VARIETY OF THE BEST IRISH MANUSCRIPTS NOW EXTANT; ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT HAVE BEEN COMPOSED FROM THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES, DOWN SAINT PATRICK AND SAINT BRIDGIT, WRITTEN IN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CENTURIES. By J. O'BRIEN. Postremo, ad perficiendam, vel certe valde promovendam litteraturam Celticam, diligentius linguæ Hiber- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. Ir is due to the public to offer an apology for undertaking an office for which I must be so little qualified as that of an Editor of an Irish Dictionary; and it may not be amiss to give some reasons for selecting O'Brien's Dictionary for republication. I should not have undertaken this work could I have met with any person, zealous for education through the medium of the Irish language, who was better qualified than myself. There are, I regret to say, very few persons zealous in this cause, who are well acquainted with the vernacular tongue, and I found none of those few sufficiently disengaged to undertake the labour. I would not under any circumstances have ventured upon the work entirely alone, but I was fortunate enough to find in my neighbourhood an intelligent and trustworthy assistant, Mr. Michael M'Ginty, a good Irish and English scholar, to whose industry and attention I am glad of having this opportunity of bearing testimony. He was not unwilling to take directions, and to go by rule towards securing uniformity in the spelling and accents of the Irish words. He has revised every line, and no change has been made either in the orthography or the accentuation without having authority from the Irish Bible, or some other printed Irish book. It may be a further apology for one not originally acquainted with the language undertaking such an office, to remark, that the Irish language has been very little indebted to natives for its cultivation. Those works which have contributed most to furnish a standard for the language, or to facilitate its study, have come from the labours of strangers. I need but mention the name of Vallancey, who, though an Englishman, has done more to promote Irish literature than all the native Irish put together. But in connexion with an Irish Dictionary, I cannot omit to mention the name of Edward Lhuyd, a learned Welchman, to whom we owe the first Irish-English Dictionary that ever issued from the Press. How far we are indebted to him for the Dictionary now reprinted, will appear in the sequel. Mr. Lhuyd was a very eminent linguist, and engaged deeply in researches into the ancient languages of Great Britain; for the furtherance of which study he set himself to learn the Irish language. The circumstances which led him to this work will best appear by the following extract from his Preface to the Irish Dictionary, published in his Archæologia Britannica, a translation of which Preface is to be found at the end of Nicholson's Irish Library: "It is but reasonable that I here make an apology for undertaking to write and publish a Dictionary of a different language from my native tongue, and which I did not learn by ear from any person whose native language it was. "Some Welch and English gentlemen laid their commands on me to write something beyond what has hitherto been published concerning the original antiquity of the British nation, and in regard, that the old and ancient languages are the keys that open the way to the knowledge of antiquity, I found it the more necessary to make myself as much master as possible of all the old obsolete words of my own native language; for it was generally owned and taken for granted, (whether true or false,) that the British was the first and most ancient language in Great Britain. "As soon as I had made, by the help of a certain parchment manuscript, a tolerable progress in the old British language, I found my knowledge therein not only imperfect and defective as to the meaning and signification of the old names of persons and places, but also that there were many more words in the old statutes, histories, and poems, whose significations still remained to me very dubious and obscure, notwithstanding the great benefit and advantage we have from the Welch and Latin Dictionary compiled by the very learned and ingenious Dr. J. Davies, and printed at London, a. D. 1632. "This difficulty naturally led me to conjecture that a little skill in the old Irish words would be very useful to me in explaining those old British words, and therefore I applied myself to read the Irish Bible, and the Chronological History of |