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 red coat, the pot of gold and the buckled shoes are all much later additions.

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.

Usually traced to Irish spraoi, though some etymologists hold out for a Scots origin. Either way it arrived in English as something you go on.