Am Faclair Beag

The Faclair Beag is one of the most popular Gaelic/English dictionaries at the moment (certainly popular enough for the LearnGaelic project to buy a license to it). The basic idea behind it is to bring together all Gaelic terminology and idiom in the one place. So to begin with, you will find both Dwelly’s classic dictionary side by side with more modern entries. Oh, did we mention it’s free for everyone to use?

It provides a wealth of information and extra features too, such as:

  • key grammatical information (gender, verbal noun forms, comparative forms)
  • pronunciation information – the IPA for the word and a sound recording (if we have managed to record one already)
  • a key to how common a word or phrase is (the stars)
  • maps that show where a word is commonly used (provided we have collected data on it)
  • examples of usage
  • simple and advanced search tools

and much more. You’ll find the dictionary here and if you need more information about the Faclair’s advanced features, try this page.

You can also put a link on your mobile phone’s desktop now to get to it real quick. You need to do the following:
Android Phones
Bookmark the page in the phone’s default browser

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Go to your Bookmarks and press and hold and when the options come up, tell it to Add shortcut to Home.

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That’s it:

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iPhones/iPads
Go to the page and tap the Bookmark icon on screen. When the menu comes up, press Add to Home Screen:

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That’s it:

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We have had requests to produce an actual app which can be used offline too but unfortunately we just don’t have enough time to handle app development (which we’d have to do for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone what who knows what else), plus there are data security issues we don’t want to go into right now. But we feel the shortcut option is almost as good, most people have data services anyway these days.

3 thoughts on “Am Faclair Beag

  • 21 November 2014 at 4:11 am
    Permalink

    Greetings!
    A potential project? I recently bought a Kindle reader from Amazon; and found a copy of Dwelly for $0.99. It is atrocious. It appears either to have been scanned (with many illegible characters) or to have serious formatting issues. I wrote a review asking that they contact you for help in “fixing it”.
    Best wishes,
    Kirsten

    Reply
    • 21 November 2014 at 11:55 am
      Permalink

      Hi Kirsten,
      Thanks for the suggestion. I have sort of toyed with the idea at the back of my head but given there’s a paper version and a digital version on the web, it’s not really high on my list of priorities. Do you reckon it would be really useful as a kindle edition on top of those?

      Reply
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