Welcome to the online Database of Contemporary Irish Words developed by Foras na Gaeilge as part of their ongoing lexicographical research arising from the New English-Irish Dictionary project. The objective of focal.ie is to list every contemporary Irish word in one online database. Seven of the primary lexicographical sources are included in the website, from dictionaries to terminology databases and corpora. These sources span the period beginning with the publication of the Official Standard for Irish (An Caighdeán Oifigiúil) and de Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary in 1959, right up to today’s contemporary online sources such as focloir.ie, tearma.ie and gaois.ie. This website will allow users to find every contemporary Irish word on one site, together with information about the sources in which those words may be found.
On the homepage you’ll see a list of words on the left. This list may be sorted alphabetically or by word frequency (from the New Corpus for Ireland). If you type some characters in the search box at the top of the screen, the list of words will automatically be reduced to a list beginning with whatever characters you typed. For example:
On the right the ticks show in which sources the specific words may be found. To see the entry for any word in any source, all you have to do is click on the tick for that word/source and a new tab will open in your browser, showing you the search results for that word in your selected source. For example, if you want to see the evidence for the word ‘rogha’ in focloir.ie or in gaois.ie, click in the red circle or in the blue circle, respectively, as shown below.
The number of times a word appears in the New Corpus for Ireland is shown. This corpus contains 30 million words of Irish and was developed in 2008 as part of the work on the New English-Irish Dictionary. It is a large collection of Irish-language texts from a wide variety of genres: fictional works, informational texts, news reports, official documents and more.
If there’s a tick in the NEID cell, the word is available on the NEID website as a primary translation. In this first version of the website, secondary search results are not included – see the Secondary Results section below. If you click on the ticked cell a new tab will open, where you’ll see the search results for that word in NEID.
Note that there is no lemmatised search for Irish available yet on the NEID website, so you’ll only find exact matches for the input string. For example, a search for ‘seachtain’ will only return results with that exact word; you won’t be shown ‘sheachtain’, ‘seachtaine’, ‘tseachtain’, ‘seachtainí’, etc.
If there’s a tick in the tearma.ie cell, the word may be found as an Irish term or as part of an Irish term on the tearma.ie website. If you click on that cell a new tab will open where you’ll see the search results for that word on tearma.ie.
If there’s a tick in the FGB cell, the word may be found as a headword or in the body of FGB. If you click on that cell a new tab will open where you’ll see the search results for that word in FGB on teanglann.ie.
If there’s a tick in the EID cell, the word may be found as a primary translation in EID. If you click on that cell a new tab will open where you’ll see the search results for that word in EID on teanglann.ie.
If there’s a tick in the gaois.ie cell, the word may be found as an Irish term or as part of an Irish term on the gaois.ie website. If you click on that cell a new tab will open where you’ll see the search results for that word on gaois.ie.
If there’s a tick in the FB cell, the word may be found as a headword or in the body of FB. If you click on that cell a new tab will open where you’ll see the search results for that word in FB on teanglann.ie.
The first version of the website was launched in 2018. We plan to continually develop the site and its functions in the future. Feedback is welcome at aiseolas3@forasnagaeilge.ie.
In this first version of the website, occurrences of words in secondary fields in the various sources (Related Entries, example sentences, etc) are not included. This is one of the developments which is planned for the future.
