English Words with Irish Origins Quiz

Answer: brogue

Originally the Irish 'bróg' was a rough, stout shoe made of rawhide and tied with thongs, from the Old Irish 'broce', a generic term for shoe. The rural Irish and Scottish highlanders wore such brogues, and the word appeared in the English language in the 1580s. Its first use in the sense of a Celtic accent (particularly Irish or Scottish) apparently appeared in 1705.

Other sources hypothesize that the word 'brogue' meaning "accent" came from the Old Irish 'barrog', meaning "a hold" (on the tongue).

Answer: boycott

Captain Charles C. Boycott (1832-1897) was a British land agent in Lough-Mask, County Mayo who refused to reduce his rents for tenant farmers. The Irish Land League tried negotiation without success. On the advice of Charles Stewart Parnell, instead of resorting to violence, the League promoted ostracizing Boycott by refusing to do business with him or even to associate with him.

In 1880 the term 'boycott' was quickly adopted by newspapers worldwide, as far away as Japan (where it was 'boikotto').

Answer: callow

The Irish word 'calac', meaning "bare" or "bald", became the Anglo-Saxon word 'cahu' and eventually the Modern English 'callow'. 'Calac' comes from the same Proto-Germanic root, '*kalwa-', as German 'Kahl' and Dutch 'kaal'. 'Calac' described young birds who had not yet grown feathers (bald); then it was extended to any young, inexperienced creature and eventually developed the sense of "youthful, juvenile, immature" by the 1570s.

Answer: hooligan

A hooligan is a rough, lawless, aggressive person, usually a youth. In the 1890s through the turn of the century, Irishman Patrick Hoolihan and his family ran riot in London. British newspaper police-court reports began in the summer of 1898 to adopt a variant of the family's name to describe all such disruptive and thuggish behavior. 'Houlihan' was a also a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union adopted 'hooligan' as 'khuligan', meaning "scofflaw" or "political dissenter" and the like.

Answer: kibosh

In 1836, the word 'kye-bosk' appeared in the English language, and eventually morphed in to 'kibosh' in the slang phrase 'put the kibosh on' (to end something). The word 'kibosh' looks Yiddish, sounds like it might come from Hebrew or Turkish, but it first appeared in a Dickens piece set in the heavily Irish "Seven Dials" neighborhood in the West End of London. Most likely it came from Irish 'caip bháis' or 'caipín báis' ("cap of death"), the black cap donned by a judge when pronouncing a death sentence. Bernard Share, however, in "Slanguage, A Dictionary of Slang" thinks the 'caip bháis' actually refers to "pitch-capping", a gruesome execution method used by British forces against insurgents in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (also called the United Irishmen Rebellion).

Answer: glen

A glen is a small, secluded valley (in the mountains). It first appeared in Middle English, borrowing from the 15th-century Irish Gaelic and Scots-Gaelic 'gleann'. This came from the Old Irish 'glenn', also spelled 'glend', which is also the ancestor of Welsh 'glyn' and Manx 'glion', and which in turn comes from Proto-Celtic '*glendos'.

Answer: slogan

The Gaelic 'sluagh-ghairm' is a battle cry once used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans. The word 'sluagh' means "army, host, slew" and in turn comes from Celtic and Balto-Slavic '*slough-', meaning "help, service." The second part comes from Old Irish 'gairm' ("a cry"), whence we get other words like 'garrulous' ("talkative"). The metaphoric sense of a political organization's or a company's distinctive word or phrase developed by 1704.

Answer: puss

From the Irish 'pus' meaning "lip, mouth", which entered the English language in the 1890s, we get such dated phrases in old movies as "I'm going to sock you right in the puss". The word 'puss' for "face" or especially "mouth" was once common boxing slang. The Irish word also gives us 'sourpuss', meaning a habitually sour or gloomy person, especially in facial expression, and 'glamor puss' (or 'glamour puss'), meaning a person with a beautiful face, and sometimes by extension a person, especially a woman, overly concerned with her appearance. And then there's 'picklepuss', which is someone with an exaggerated frown, scowl, or sullen expression, and 'pizza-puss', a person with bad acne and scarring.

Homographs are words that have the same spelling but differ in origin and meaning (and sometimes pronunciation). The other 'puss', meaning cat, comes from the Middle Low German 'pūse' by way of the Dutch 'poes'.

Answer: galore

Entering English in the 1670s, the word "galore" comes directly from the Irish Gaelic 'go leór' and/or possibly the Scotch-Gaelic 'gu leóir', meaning "enough" or "to sufficiency". The second element comes from Old Irish 'roar' which is a false cognate and does not mean the sound a lion makes but rather "enough" and which in turn comes from the Proto-Celtic '*ro-wero-' meaning "sufficiency." The particle 'go' usually means "to", though it is often attached to adjectives, as in this case, to form adverbs.

A particle, by the way, is a short word that has grammatical function, but it is not easily classified into the major parts of speech.

Answer: phony

'Phony' or 'phoney' refers to something counterfeit or fake, and as an adjective it is a respelling (c. 1895-1900) of the Irish slang 'fawney' for a finger ring, especially one of gilt brass that flimflam men try to pass off as gold in a confidence game called a 'fawney rig'. One of the word's earliest appearances is in the 5 April 1899 issue of "The Jeweler's Review": "His most successful swindle was selling 'painted' or 'phony' diamonds." (Note how the writer used quotation marks because the word was still rather novel.) The current Irish and Old Irish word is 'fáinne'. 'Phony' as a noun appeared a few years later, in 1902.