The words English took from Irish

A translation of the Latin aqua vitae. English took the first word and dropped the rest, so 'whiskey' is literally just 'water'. The spelling with an e is Irish and American; Scotch is whisky.

One of the cleanest borrowings in the language, and one of the few English adjectives that follows its noun (whiskey galore, not galore whiskey) because that is where it sits in Irish.

Smidirín is a small piece; the -ín on the end is the Irish diminutive, the same ending that makes Seán into Seáinín. English kept the Irish plural feel and added its own -s on top.

Not a ghost but a keening woman of the sídhe, heard rather than seen, whose cry foretold a death in certain families. The wail is the caoineadh — which gave English 'keening'.

The keen was a formal lament sung over the dead by women, often improvised on the spot. The greatest surviving example is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's lament for her murdered husband Art Ó Laoghaire, spoken over his body in 1773.

Two Irish words compete for it. Bróg is a shoe, and the story goes that a brogue was the accent of a man who wore them; barróg means a grip or a hold, as in a hold on the tongue. Both are Irish; nobody is sure which one.

As in 'a slew of problems'. The same word gives the Sluagh of folklore, the host of the restless dead who ride the air, and it is the slua in Sluagh-ghairm, the battle cry that became 'slogan'.

The shout a Gaelic host raised going into battle, adopted into English through Scots. Every advertising slogan is, etymologically, a war cry.

Around 1646 it was a term of abuse for Irish Catholics dispossessed of their land, some of whom took to the hills as outlaws. About 1680 English opponents threw it at supporters of the Catholic Duke of York, and after 1689 those supporters made it a party name — which the British Conservative Party still answers to.

Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent in Mayo. In 1880 the Land League persuaded his labourers, shopkeepers and even his postman to have nothing to do with him — Parnell's tactic of leaving a man 'severely alone'. Within weeks his name was a verb in newspapers around the world, and it now exists in French, German, Dutch, Russian and Japanese.

Ireland exported both the landscape and the word. The related meanings (to bog down, a bog-standard thing) all descend from the same soft ground.

The plant is small clover; the emblem is the story. The tradition that Patrick used it to explain the Trinity is not recorded anywhere until the eighteenth century, more than a thousand years after him.

The earliest form is luchorpán and the earliest tale, in the Echtra Fergus mac Léti, has three of them trying to drag a sleeping king into the sea. The green suit, the pot of gold and the buckled shoes are all much later additions; the older leprechaun wore red. A 2019 study proposes a Roman origin for the name instead, from the Luperci.

In Irish clann means the children of a family; it came into English through Scots Gaelic as the name for a kin-group. So a clan is, literally, somebody's children.

From Irish and Scots Gaelic triús — the trews. English added the -ers by analogy with 'drawers'.

Still perfectly good Irish for a bird's beak, and perfectly good English for telling somebody to shut theirs. Gobsmacked is the same word.

As in a sour puss, or having a puss on you. Nothing to do with cats — that is a different word entirely.

An ordinary Irish word for a girl that English romanticised into something misty and rural. Irish speakers still just mean 'girl'.

An unlicensed drinking house. The word travelled with the Irish to Scotland, to America and, notably, to South Africa, where shebeens became central to township life under apartheid.

Of uncertain origin. It first appears in Scottish dialect writing in 1804; Irish spraoi is one suggestion, Scots spreath, 'a cattle raid', another. Either way it arrived in English as something you go on.

A country lane. Bóithrín is the diminutive of bóthar, road — the same -ín that makes smithereens and colleen.

An old name for a badger, from broc or a Celtic cognate of it.

A heavy shoe or work boot, from brógan, the diminutive of bróg, shoe — brogue's smaller relation.

Wet clay or mud, and in America curdled milk — bonnyclabber is thick sour milk, from bainne clabair.

The blood sausage of Cork, named for the casing it is made in.

A red seaweed eaten along the Atlantic coast.

The long gravel ridges left by rivers under the ice sheets. Irish gave the word to geologists everywhere.

Taken up by the 19th-century revolutionary brotherhood.

A small French hackney carriage, named, by way of the Hôtel de Saint-Fiacre in Paris where they were first hired, after St Fiachra, a seventh-century Irish saint who lived most of his life in France.

The Scottish mercenaries who fought for Irish lords from the 13th century; the MacSweeneys and MacDonnells among them.

The five-line comic poem, named after the city and county; how it came by the name is not certain.

Lough Neagh, Lough Derg, Lough Foyle. The Scottish spelling loch is the same word.

Illicit spirit distilled from grain or potatoes, named for the small pot still it was made in.

A name for Ireland in 18th- and 19th-century songs; the ballad of that name is set in 1798.

The fairy folk; the sí are the mounds they live in. See banshee, bean sí, a woman of the sí.

An untrustworthy, cunning person — used in Ireland and in Newfoundland, which took a great deal of Irish speech with it.

Originally mud or mudflats (the North and South Slob in Wexford are reclaimed mudland). Slobber and slobbery are a different, Old English word.

A little extra given free by a seller — a Newfoundland word from the Irish for 'more'.

A lake that comes and goes with the seasons, filling from below in winter and draining away in summer — found in the limestone of the Burren and east Galway, and almost nowhere else.