Animal names in Irish

Wind prick made me chuckle

God’s little cow 🥹🥹🥹🥹

I used to know loads of these but off the top of my head:

The Irish word for squid is very difficult to translate but literally it means something like “squishy mother” or “sucking mother” (máthair shúigh).

A heron is a Siobhán fhada, or “lanky Siobhán” – think along the lines of “plain Jane” in English; another word for it is a corr éisc, or “lanky thing that eats fish”. The word “corr” means awkward or lanky and is the word for several birds: corr móna (lanky thing of the bog) is a crane, and corr bán (lanky white thing) is a stork.

There is a seabird with a very cute English name, the turnstone, cos it spends all day flipping pebbles over to find prey. In Irish its called a piardálaí trá, or “beach raider”.

The word for whale is “míol mara”, which can be translated as “sea creature” or, rather, “sea louse”.

Otter is madra usice, or water dog.

Muc mara is a porpoise, a “sea pig”, similarly to its English name by coincidence.

A killer whale or orca is a cráin dubh – the closest translation is “black sow”. Cráin is a general word for the female of certain animals, in the same way as “cow” and “hen” are the words for the females of several different species in English. It’s also called a “grampas”, though this is a generic word for several large dolphin species.