Cló Gaelach: The Old Script of the Irish Language

For four centuries, Irish was written in Cló Gaelach — the flowing Gaelic type with its séimhiú dot and its little symbol for “and”. Here is the story of the old script, and why the ‘h’ was once a dot.

Open an Irish schoolbook printed before the 1960s and the language looks subtly different on the page. The letters flow with a rounded, hand-drawn grace; some consonants wear a small dot on top; and the word for "and" is just a tiny mark — ⁊. This is Cló Gaelach, Gaelic type: the traditional face in which Irish was written and printed for the better part of four centuries.

A script born in the monasteries

The shapes of Cló Gaelach reach back to the insular script of the early medieval Irish monasteries — the same tradition of hands that produced the Book of Kells. When printing arrived in Ireland, those letterforms were cut into metal type. The first book printed in Irish characters appeared in 1571, using a font made during the reign of Elizabeth I, and for centuries afterward, Irish in print simply meant Cló Gaelach.

The dot that replaced the h

The most useful thing to know about the old script is the séimhiú dot. In modern Irish, lenition — the softening of a consonant — is written with an h after the letter: bh, ch, mh, th. In Cló Gaelach, that h was instead a single dot placed over the consonant, the ponc séimhithe (or buailte):

• bh → ḃ
• ch → ċ
• mh → ṁ
• th → ṫ

So mhaith became ṁaiṫ, and chroí became ċroí — the same sound, fewer letters, and, to many eyes, a more elegant page.

⁊ — the little symbol for "and"

You'll also meet the Tironian et: ⁊. It's an ancient piece of shorthand for the word agus ("and") — older even than the Irish language itself. It comes from a Roman system of shorthand said to have been devised by Tiro, the secretary of Cicero. In Cló Gaelach it did the job of the ampersand. Look closely and you'll still find it today, carved on old signs and stamped on Irish postboxes.

Why it faded — and where it lives on

Cló Gaelach remained the norm in Irish print right up to the 1950s and 60s. Then, as part of a wider modernisation of the language — the same era that brought the standardised spelling, An Caighdeán Oifigiúil — Ireland shifted to the Roman type used for English and most of Europe (cló Rómhánach), and the h returned in place of the dot. The reasons were practical: Roman type was cheaper, more widely available, and far easier for typewriters and, later, computers.

But the old script never entirely disappeared. It survives on shopfronts and street signs, in the ⁊ on the postbox, in the emblems of Irish institutions, and in the memory of everyone who first learned to read Irish in it. It carries a particular warmth — the look of a language with deep roots.

See your own words in Cló Gaelach

We've built a little tool so you can try it yourself: type any Irish, and watch it turn into the traditional script — dots, Tironian et and all — set in a genuine Gaelic type. Open the Cló Gaelach tool →

Go raibh maith agat — or, as it once was, go raiḃ maiṫ agat.