319 first names — 117 for girls, 198 for boys — with how to say them, what they mean, and the saint, queen or legend standing behind each one. Every one of them was carried by somebody long before it was carried by you.
Many of these names belong to people in the old stories: the women who fight in them, the gods and goddesses, and the creatures they met.
Irish spelling is regular once you know it, but it is not English spelling: bh and mh sound like v or w, dh and gh are usually silent or a soft y, s before e or i sounds like sh, and a fada (á é í ó ú) lengthens the vowel. So Siobhán is 'shi-VAWN', Sadhbh is 'sive' and Tadhg is 'tyge'. Irish has three main dialect groups (Ulster, Connacht and Munster) and many names are said differently in each. The respellings here give the pronunciation most commonly heard in Irish English; where a well-known variant exists, both are shown.
In 2025, the most recent year in the Central Statistics Office register, the top five girls' names in the Republic were Lily, Éabha, Fiadh, Grace, Sadie, and the top five boys' names were Rían, Jack, Noah, James, Oisín. Irish-language names hold several of those places — a reversal of the twentieth century, when they were in retreat. The full register, back to 1964, is on the popular names page.
Because Irish names were written down for centuries by clerks who did not speak Irish. One name could be recorded a dozen ways, and later families chose whichever spelling had stuck to them — which is why Méabh, Meadhbh and Maeve are all the same name.
The síneadh fada — 'long accent' — is the stroke over á, é, í, ó and ú. It lengthens the vowel and it is not decoration: Seán is a man's name, seán without the fada is not the same word at all.
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