Irish Girl Names

Irish naming preserves a stock that is genuinely old and genuinely distinct, and it has survived a series of pressures that removed comparable traditions elsewhere in Britain.

Many of these names come from Irish mythology and the early medieval sagas — Niamh, Deirdre, Gráinne, Étaín, Aoife, Medb — figures from a body of literature written down from the seventh century onward and drawing on considerably older material. Others come from the early Irish church, which produced its own calendar of saints largely separate from the continental one.

The spelling is where most non-Irish readers stumble, and it is worth saying that the orthography is regular rather than arbitrary: Irish marks consonant quality with adjacent vowels, which is why the vowel clusters look excessive to an English eye. Aoife is pronounced roughly EE-fa, Niamh NEEV, Sadhbh SIVE. The system is consistent once learned.

Anglicised forms circulate alongside the Irish ones — Eileen for Eibhlín, Sheila for Síle, Nora for Nóra — and are often treated as separate names now. This library lists both.

Áine, one of the oldest names here, is a case where two histories converge: it is an Irish goddess name, and it is also used as an Irish form of Anna, which arrived from Hebrew by way of the Bible.