The Arts and Humanities Research Council has made a substantial five-year award to Professor Greg Toner of Queen’s University Belfast and Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh of ASNC to enable a new phase of work on the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (www.dil.ie) to be undertaken.
Professor Toner published the first electronic edition of the Dictionary in 2007 and produced a Supplement containing revisions to 4000 entries in 2013, again with AHRC funding. The related project for which he and Dr Ní Mhaonaigh have been awarded funding will involve a revision of its contents by examining all key textual editions that were not available to the original compilers of the printed Dictionary (published as 23 separate fascicles between 1913 and 1976) on which the electronic version is based. The project will uncover previously unrecorded words, excise ghost words and suggest new or revised definitions. The augmented electronic Dictionary will contain new information on words relating to agriculture, medicine, law, music, religion and society that will be of particular interest to historians and archaeologists. It will trace the origin and development of words over a period of a millennium. New features will be added including a mobile version and a ‘Word of the Day’.
An important aspect of the Project will be training in lexicography and textual edition for younger scholars and the team will run a number of workshops aimed especially at doctoral students. The rich vocabulary of the Dictionary is ripe for exploitation by creative writers and thinkers in modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and project staff will collaborate with authors, translators and terminologists to explore ways of reviving old words in new contexts.
