93 towns and cities with the name each one carries in Irish, what it means, and how to say it. An Irish placename is a description rather than a label: the first word almost always tells you what the place was before it was a town — a church, a fort, a ford, a meadow, an island.
Cill is a church, from Latin cella — a monk's cell. A Cill name marks an early Christian foundation, and the word after it is usually the saint: Cill Chainnigh is Canice's church, Cill Dara the church of the oak that Brigid chose.
Dún is a stronghold, and the name after it is usually the man who held it — Dún Dealgan, Dealga's fort. Caiseal is a stone fort, lios a ringfort, daingean a fastness. The distinction is what the walls were made of and who was behind them.
Baile is the commonest word in the Irish landscape and the youngest of these: it meant a piece of land or a homestead long before it meant a town, and most Baile names date from after the Normans.
Before bridges, a town happened where you could cross. Áth is a ford and droichead a bridge — Droichead Átha, the bridge of the ford, is Drogheda, a name that records the upgrade.
Inis is an island, and Irish is generous with it: islands in the sea, islands in a lake, and dry ground in a river-meadow that is only an island when the water is up. Ennis is simply Inis, alone.
Cluain is the dry meadow beside a river or bog that the early monasteries looked for; ros is a wood or a headland; doire an oak grove; eochaill a yew wood. These are names from before anyone cleared anything.
Where the land meets water and something had to be built: a strand, a landing place, the mouth of a river, the head of the tide.
Hills, mills, caves and stepping stones: the names that describe something other than a settlement, a defence or a crossing.
In most cases the English name is a clerk's attempt at the Irish sound — Cill Chainnigh becomes Kilkenny, and you can hear how. In these, the two names are different words for the same place, usually because the Vikings named their port and the Irish named the same spot for themselves.
Baile Átha Cliath, “BAL-ya AW-ha KLEE-a”, the town of the hurdled ford, for a crossing of the Liffey made passable with woven hurdles. The English name is a different Irish name entirely: Duibhlinn, the black pool, where the Poddle met the Liffey.
A church, from Latin cella. Cill Chainnigh is the church of Cainneach (Kilkenny), Cill Dara the church of the oak (Kildare), Cill Airne the church of the sloes (Killarney). Where you see Kil- in an English name you are usually looking at an early monastery — though coill, a wood, anglicises the same way.
Arklow, Waterford and Wexford are Norse in their English forms — and in each case the Irish name is a completely different word: An tInbhear Mór, Port Láirge and Loch Garman. The Vikings founded Ireland's first towns, and the Irish named the same places for themselves.
“Cove” — and that is not a coincidence. An Cóbh is an Irish spelling of the English word cove, one of the few Irish placenames that borrows in that direction. The town was Queenstown from 1849 until 1920.
Béal Feirste, “bayl FERSH-cha”, the mouth of the sandbank ford, the crossing of the river Farset, which now runs in a culvert under High Street.
Baile means a homestead or a piece of land, and only later a town. It is the commonest element in Irish placenames, well over five thousand townlands, and most Baile names are post-Norman, from when land began to be held in named units.
Pronunciations give the everyday Irish-English form; the dialects differ, sometimes a lot, and a local pronunciation always beats a written one. Logainm, the State's placenames database, is the authority for any name here.
Spoken audio is synthesised by ABAIR, the Irish speech project of the Phonetics & Speech Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin — a machine reading the word, not a recording of a speaker. For native speakers in three dialects, Teanglann has recordings.
Towns & cities, one by one · The 32 counties in Irish · Decode any Irish placename · Surnames in Irish