Irish Baby Names and How to Pronounce Them

Forty-two Irish names, with a plain-English way to say each one

Irish spelling is regular; it is just not English. Once you know that bh and mh are usually a v sound, that dh and gh are usually silent, that s before e or i is a sh sound, and that a síneadh fada lengthens the vowel it sits on, most of the list below stops looking difficult.

Two honest warnings. First, Irish has three main dialects and pronunciations differ between Ulster, Connacht and Munster, so the respellings below are the most widely used version rather than the only correct one. Second, several of these names have a native pronunciation and a settled anglicised one, and neither is wrong. Where they diverge, both are given. Ranks are the Central Statistics Office figures for Ireland in 2025 and the Office for National Statistics figures for England and Wales in 2025.

What the data actually shows

These names are ordinary in Ireland and rare next door

The rank column is the point of this page. Fiadh is the third most popular girls' name in Ireland and 256th in England and Wales. Saoirse is 17th and 402nd. Caoimhe is 31st and 1,110th. Sadhbh is 32nd in Ireland and was given to six girls in the whole of England and Wales. Tadhg is 8th and 412th. If your family lives on both sides of the Irish Sea, that gap is the practical decision in front of you, not the etymology.

The fada is not decoration

The CSO has recorded accents since 2018 and treats the accented and unaccented spellings as different names. Seán ranked 23rd in 2025; Sean without the fada ranked 141st. The office notes that Jack, Seán, John and Sean together account for 862 boys and would be Ireland's most popular name if counted as one. Whichever form you choose, choose it deliberately, because it is what will appear on every document your child ever holds.

Anglicised and native forms are separate names, not spellings

Fionn and Finn are ranked separately in Ireland — 6th and 15th in 2025. Eoin and Eoghan are different names with different histories, one from Latin Iohannes and one from an Old Irish root, even though many speakers say them almost identically. Rían and Ryan are related but not the same: Rían is the Irish given name, Ryan the English form of the surname Ó Riain.

How to use this list

Decide in advance which pronunciation you will teach. A child called Caoimhe in Manchester will be asked how to say her name several times a week for a decade. That is not a reason to avoid the name; it is a reason to settle on one answer, and to be relaxed about the anglicised version rather than treating it as a mistake.

Check the meaning rather than trusting the impression. Several popular Irish names have genuinely uncertain etymologies — Deirdre, Naoise and Eoghan among them — and a confident one-line meaning on a baby-name site is usually a guess dressed up. Where reference works disagree, this list says so.

Finally, listen before you commit. Teanglann publishes recorded pronunciations of Irish words in all three dialects, and many of these names are ordinary vocabulary: saoirse is freedom, fia is deer, croí is heart. Hearing the word said by a native speaker is worth more than any respelling on a page, including this one.