Early Irish Glossaries Database

A resource by Paul Russell, Sharon Arbuthnot, Pádraic Moran, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The early Irish glossaries Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary), O’Mulconry’s Glossary (De origine scoticae linguae), Dúil Dromma Cetta (the Collection of Druim Cett) and the shorter texts Loman and Irsan are important resources for our understanding of the literary and cultural environment of medieval Ireland. These inter-related texts, compiled from the seventh or eighth century onwards, comprise several thousand headwords followed by commentary that ranges from single-word explanations to extended narratives running to several pages.

The Early Irish Glossaries Project was a three-year project (2006–2009) based in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. The project produced this digital resource and a series of articles on the texts and contexts of early Irish glossaries (see Bibliography). An edition of both O'Mulconry's Glossary and Irsan was published in 2019. Editions of other glossaries are in progress.

This digital resource provides:

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