About

Quare Stuff is a small, slow dictionary of the words of Ireland: the ones that lasted, the ones that drifted, and those that never quite made it into formal anthologies before.

It started as a list in my head when I noticed outsiders didn't use the word loanin to mean a narrow lane. When a friend from Omagh called something wild nice, and didn't mean wild. An old woman in Belfast told me to stand back from a sheugh when the bus was pulling up. My own mother telling me about the jeboon (a travelling circus) visiting Jonesborough when she was a child. My wee list grew and I started to ask questions. The questions became this site. I still haven't tracked down jeboon.

Each entry tries to do three things: tell you what the word means, tell you where it came from, and tell you where you might still hear it. I add new words, phrases and place names as I hear them or read them. You can write to me with your own.

I run the site on my own. If you have a word you'd like to see here - or a correction, or a memory, or a sentence you heard once on a bus and have never quite forgotten - please write to me at patrick [at] quarestuff [dot] com.