What the fada does

The síneadh fada (the “long sign”, the acute mark on á é í ó ú) looks like a decoration. It is not. It is part of the letter, the way the crossbar is part of a t, and removing it does not simplify an Irish word: it replaces the word with a different one. This site treats a dropped fada as a broken word and machine-checks every accent on every page. Here is why that pedantry is the least we owe you.

One toast, two spellings

Take the one Irish word nearly everyone knows: Sláinte, the toast, meaning health. Now take the version that actually circulates on social media, on menus, on mass-produced signs: slainte, no mark. To an English eye the two are the same word in different fonts. To Irish, the first is the word for health and the second is not a word at all: it is the husk left when a computer system, somewhere between the writer and you, threw away a letter it did not understand.

That is the usual villain, by the way: not ignorance but transit. Spreadsheets, order forms, engraving-shop software, content systems guessing at encodings. Irish text passes through them and comes out with its marks stripped or mangled. Nobody decides to misspell the word. The pipeline decides.

The vowel is a different vowel

What the mark actually does is lengthen the vowel. fada means long. The a in Sláinte is the long open vowel of English “father”; strip the mark and Irish reads a short vowel, and a different word begins. And because vowel length is meaningful in Irish, minimal pairs are everywhere: the word for a man and the word for grass are the same four letters to an English eye, distinguished only by the mark; so are the word for old and one of the commonest names in the country. A carver who drops one fada from a headstone has not made a typo. He has said something else.

You can watch a pair at work inside a single proverb we publish: Is fearr an tsláinte ná na táinte: health is better than herds. The little word ná, with the fada, is “than”; the little word na, without it, is “the”. Both occur in that sentence, side by side, doing different jobs. Fold them together and the grammar of the proverb quietly collapses, and every automated system that “cleans up accents” folds them together.

Or consider céad, the hundred in Go maire tú an céad: may you live to be a hundred. Unmark it and you have the Irish for permission. A birthday toast becomes a bureaucratic note, one pixel-width of acute at a time.

What this site does about it

Every record here stores its Irish in a normalised form and passes a machine check we call fada-lint before any page ships: it rejects mangled encodings, stray look-alike accents (there are characters that render like a fada and are not one), decomposed characters that compare wrongly, and anything outside the Irish alphabet. The rendered pages are scanned again after building, because text can be perfect on disk and corrupted in transit to the page. That is the exact failure the whole problem is made of. Even the two fonts this site ships are parsed on every build to prove they still contain the accented letters; a font subsetting step that silently dropped them would otherwise show you fadas from a fallback typeface and tell no one.

One check no machine can do: a fada that was cleanly dropped before the text reached us leaves legal-looking text behind, which is why every record also names its printed source, so a human can compare wording against page. The checks catch corrupted Irish; the citations catch impoverished Irish. How the whole method works is its own story.

What you should do about it

If you are putting Irish anywhere permanent: copy, don’t retype. Every record page here has a copy button that carries the exact wording, marks and all, and says so. Because “fadas included” is precisely the reassurance the moment needs. Then check the proof your printer or engraver sends you against the record, letter by letter, and check the marks lean the right way: the fada always leans forward. Two minutes of comparison is cheap. The other kind of correction involves a chisel.