About Baby Names of Ireland
The meanings, pronunciations and stories behind 323 Irish names, online since 2003.
What we do
Baby Names of Ireland helps parents, and anyone curious, understand Irish names: what they mean, how to say them, where they come from, and how popular they are in Ireland today. Each name has its own page with a plain-English pronunciation, its meaning and origin, any legend it belongs to, its spelling in Irish and in Ogham, and its record in Ireland’s official birth statistics.
Where our information comes from
- Popularity comes from the Central Statistics Office’s baby name tables, which list every first name given to three or more babies in Ireland each year from 1964 to 2025 (CSO girls’ names, boys’ names, CC BY 4.0). Ranks are the CSO’s own. Since 2018 the CSO counts spellings with and without fadas separately, so our charts add them together, and each page says how many babies had each spelling.
- Meanings and origins draw on Irish dictionaries (teanglann.ie and focloir.ie), the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and standard references on Irish names. Where a name’s origin is uncertain, or it isn’t Irish in origin, the page says so.
- Legends are retold from the Irish myths and sagas; several were written for us by pupils at Coolderry National School in Co. Offaly.
- Videos on the name pages are our own, from the Baby Names of Ireland YouTube channel.
How we write pronunciations
Irish spelling follows different rules from English, so each name is respelled the way an English speaker would read it, split into syllables with the stressed one in capitals: Aoife is EE-fa, Siobhán is shiv-AWN, Caoimhe is KEE-va. Irish has three main dialects, from Ulster, Connacht and Munster, and some names are said differently in each; where a second pronunciation is common, the page gives it too.
How we write names in Ogham
Ogham is the alphabet of Ireland’s oldest inscriptions. We write each name letter by letter. Ogham has no J, K, V, W, X, Y or Z and no fadas, so those letters take the nearest Ogham letter, as our Ogham translator explains.
Who runs the site
Baby Names of Ireland has been online since 2003 and is published by Northwoods Ventures LLC. It is free to use and is paid for by advertising; ads never affect what we write about a name.
Corrections
If a meaning, pronunciation or spelling looks wrong to you, especially if you speak Irish, please tell us at support@babynamesofireland.com. We read everything and correct pages when we’re wrong.
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