Tomhais: The Daily Irish Word Game

A new five-letter Irish word every day. Six goes, an Irish keyboard with the síneadh fada, and a colour of its own for a letter that is right but for its fada. Free, and it works offline.

How it works

Guess the Irish word in six goes. After each go the tiles tell you how near you were:

An Irish keyboard

The Irish alphabet has eighteen letters: a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u. There is no j, k, q, v, w, x, y or z outside of borrowed words, so they are not on the keyboard. The five síneadh fada vowels (á é í ó ú) have keys of their own, because the fada changes a word: sean is old and séan is good luck. On a computer you can type a vowel and then an apostrophe to put the fada on it.

Where the words come from

Every word, the answers and the 469 guesses it accepts, is ordinary Irish checked against the dictionary, and a great many of them are words this site teaches elsewhere: the vocabulary lists, the stories, the comic strips, the phrases and the place names. Nothing is invented. There are 365 answers in the round, a new one every morning, and the day turns over at midnight in Ireland.

A word a day with the story behind it is at Focal an Lae, and there is more Irish to practise in the phrases, the names and the school spellings.