This is a massive book  whose contents can be accessed by clicking the alphabet seen above. There are fewer letters in the Gaelic as opposed to the English alphabet and this explains the absence  "j", "k", "q", "v" and "w". The letter "x" does not appear in Gaelic but is given above as a link to the bibliography. Scroll downward for the introduction.

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Copyright © by Rod C. Mackay

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The Celts were a language, rather than a racial, group.
The Celtic tongue is a branch of the Indo-European family of
speech which includes English and German and certain Slavonic
languages among its surviving members. The dead Indo-
European tongues include ancient Persian, Latin and Greek.
The Celtic group now comprises five living languages,
Cornish having expired in the 18th century. These six were
divided into two dialects which shared a common vocabulary
but had dissimilar speech patterns; one was the Brittonic or
Brythonic branch, the other the Gadhaelic. The former
speakers were located in Wales, Cornwall and Briton (or
England), the latter on the Isle of Man and in Ireland and
Scotland. These peoples were not the first settlers of the
islands now called Great Britain but they were there well
before the Anglo-Saxons who gave rise to the English race and
language after their arrival from the Continent in 449.
Druidheachd was literally the business of the druids, who
were the chief men and women of the community next to the
“ard righ” or “high king” of each realm. Because their
activities were little understood by the common folk most of
what they did was taken in the same context as Anglo-Saxon
witchcraft and the arts which the Anglo-Normans termed
magic. Since the druids kept no written records, druidheachd
is largely remembered in the etymology of Gaelic (one of the
few surviving Celtic languages) and in folklore. While the
druidic schools were extinguished at an early date, an
exception has been noted in the Hebrides where the Sages of
the White Mountains continued to teach druidism until
comparatively recent times. The North Uist sennachies
organized in the 1620s to prevent the utter loss of Scottish
Gaelic culture have allowed rare glimpses of these past
practises through Angus J. Macdonald the last of survivor of
their group.

Glossary and dictionary are words of Anglo-Norman
origin, the former having a close cousin in the Gaelic
faclaireachd.1 We have opted for “glossary” in entitling this
book, but even that descriptive term is no longer universally
understood among English-speaking people. The dictionary is
all-embracing, defining the “dictums,” or common word of the
language. Like dictionary, glossary is a two-part word, the
ending of both deriving from the Middle English “arai”, the
source of our word “array.” The old word “gloss” is from the
New Latin “glossa,” (tongue) and came into English by way of
the French “glossa,” (a difficult word). Interestingly, there is
a Gaelic attachment in all this, since the ending “arai” or
“ary” is thought to be based on a Celtic model, a word perhaps resembling the
modern Gaelic riadh (drawn up in rows, as for battle). An array
is thus “anything disposed in regular lines;” organized print
on a page.

A glossary is a repository for unusual words requiring
commentary and explanation beyond a simple definition. The
first glosses were interlinear translations made upon
medieval manuscripts by men attempting to explain the
peculiarities of different written languages. The independent
glossary is very much a Celtic knot for the mind, the parts
being individually accessible, the whole being strangely
wandering and difficult to comprehend. Intentionally didactic!

First published electronicallay at Sussex, New Brunswick, 1997