‘Cupla focal’ in more ways that one

It certainly brings a new twist to the phrase ‘cúpla focal’.

The team behind the country’s main Irish-English online dictionary has revealed that many visitors are looking for the ‘as Gaeilge’ version of some crude Anglo-Saxon terms.

It was revealed last month that visitors number to focloir.ie, the English-Irish dictionary translation site run by Foras na Gaeilge, has doubled, and that ‘love’ was the word for which most visitors were seeking an Irish translation. Further down the list of the 600 most frequently searched words so far in 2014 are some less family-friendly words, namely two headwords with a “vulgar” label, at positions 54 and 389.