Edward Dwelly

Edward Dwelly was born in Arundel, England in 1864 and took an interest in Scottish Gaelic while stationed in Scotland with the army. He began collecting Gaelic words at the tender age of 17 and continued to do so with fervour for most of his life.

After collecting a large body of words hitherto not found in dictionaries and gathering thousands more from other dictionaries, he began the arduous journey of putting all this data into the format of a dictionary.

Having struggled with funding and having typeset the dictionary himself, he published the first part of his dictionary in 1911 under a Gaelic nom de plume (Eòghann MacDhòmhnaill), fearing it would not be as well received if he published under his real name.

He died in 1939, having returned to England. But even more than 100 years on, his dictionary is still considered the faclair mòr na Gàidhlig, the great dictionary of Gaelic, containing more than 70,000 entries from the four cournes of the Gaelic-speaking world as Dwelly knew it.

There have been over 12 printed editions to date by numerous publishers, the last by Akerbeltz in 2011. The dictionary was even digitised and made available on the internet as Dwelly-d and Am Faclair Beag in 2009 by a Scottish software devloper (Will Robertson) and a German Gaelic scholar, Michael Bauer.