This work is intended to provide the general reader, as well as the specialist, with access to an important but neglected element of Irish Literature in English: its vocabulary and idioms. Over seventy years have elapsed since the establishment of an independent Irish state, but for complex socio-political reasons there is, as yet, no dictionary of Irish-English to which readers can turn for assistance when they encounter unfamiliar words and phrases or apparently familiar words used unconventionally by Irish writers. The focus of the work is the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, but their use of Irish-English is so extensive that the work is relevant to the entire field of Irish literature in English from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present.

Almost all aspects of Ireland and Irish life over the past 400 years are mirrored here: agricultural, economic, educational, linguistic, military, political, religious and social history as well as animals, emigration, drink, food, folklore, geography, music, mythology, plants, sports and even the mercurial Irish weather.