Welsh Word of the Day: Gwlân (wool)

Today’s Welsh word of the day is gwlân, which means wool. One thing to watch out for with this word is that it looks very similar to gwylan (seagull)!

Gwlân usually functions as a noun, in which case it’s masculine, but can also sometimes work as an adjective.

Although it’s not that often at all that a plural form of gwlân is needed, it does technically have one, which is gwlanoedd. Notice here that there is no longer an accent on the a – this means simply that it has a shorter, sharper sound, as you can hear in the pronunciation clips below.

This is an indigenous Celtic word, and versions of it are used in all the living Celtic languages today. There’s gwlan without the accent in Cornish, gloan in Breton, olann in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and ollan in Manx. These all come from the proto-Celtic noun *wlana, which meant wool, just as it does in modern Welsh.

But yet more interestingly, *wlana is one of the very few Celtic words that has been borrowed into other languages. The word was taken through Gaulish into French and ultimately English, where it is the ancestor of the word flannel (which is gwlanen in Welsh).

There are very few words of Celtic origin in English, which is surprising given that the Celtic languages are indigenous to the region that is England today, so it’s always exciting to find these little exceptions!

Here are the mutations that gwlân can take:

Gwlân is supposed to refer to the blew (fur) foundon the body of a dafad (sheep, singular), gafr (goat), or other anifail (animal). This can also less commonly be called cnu / cnuf (fleece) which has the plural cnuoedd / cnufiau (fleeces).

Gwlân is also used as an adjective to describe products made from that blew as a deunydd (textile), such as het wlân (a woollen hat). Here it has taken its soft mutated form because it is describing het, a feminine adjective. Many words for items of dillad (clothing) are feminine, such as siwmper (a jumper), maneg (a glove), and hosan (a sock). But when feminine nouns are pluralised, adjectives describing them no longer need to soft mutate.

For things that are specifically woolly rather than woollen, you’ll need the form gwlanog. This word turns up in all sorts of terms – from mamoth gwlanog (woolly mammoth) to eirin gwlanog (peaches, literally woolly plums) and of course Wales’ many many da gwlanog (an old-fashioned term for sheep, literally woolly goods).

Artificial wool can be made out of defnyddiau mwnol (mineral materials). In Welsh this is called gwlân sinidr (literally cinder-wool)or gwlân slag (slag-wool). In fact, the first recorded production of gwlân slag was in Wales, by a man named Edward Parry in 1840.

Wool for knitting should technically be called edafedd (yarn), though this distinction isn’t respected very strictly in my experience. Edafedd, sometimes called dafedd colloquially, is still a useful word to learn though, especially if you’re into celfyddydau a chrefftau (arts and crafts). It is technically the plural of the singular form edau (a piece of yarn / a piece of thread). A ball of edafedd is called a pellen, not a pêl, although the latter is the usual word for a ball in Welsh.

There are yet more words in this family, some derived directly from gwlân itself, like gwlanwr (one who works in the wool trade) and gwlana (to gather wool – but also to daydream!) The latter shows up in the idiom mynd i wlana a chael eich cneifi (to go to gather wool and come home shorn), meaning to set out on a task with high hopes but to be ultimately disappointed.

One I particularly like is gwlaniach, which originally referred to wool that has been ruined or discarded in the process of cneifio (shearing), cribo (combing), or nyddu (spinning). This follows a common pattern in Welsh of –ach or –iach being used as a pejorative suffix, often referring to small pieces of waste material. Other examples include:

• geriach = odds and ends, from gêr = gear
• dilladach = old or discarded clothes, from dillad = clothes
• pethach / petheuach = unimportant things, from peth = thing
• deiliach = discarded leaves, from dail = leaves
• cawlach = mess or hotchpotch, from cawl = soup
• blewiach = downy, fine hair, as in on a baby animal, from blew = fur

Over time, gwlaniach has evolved to have a broader meaning, making it more useful. It’s now many people’s go-to word for lint, or as a synonym for blewiach.

In English we use wool to refer to things that aren’t actually wool but look like it, like fluff on certain kinds of planhigion (plants). In Welsh gwlaniach is often used for this purpose. In the case of cotton wool specifically, this is translated literally into Welsh, producing the phrase gwlân cotwm, though the slang word wadin is also in use.

Because of the da gwlanog for which Wales is so famous, the diwydiant gwlân (wool industry) has been one of the country’s most important. Today it is less so, because the whole of the Deyrnas Unedig (United Kingdom) has moved towards more of a service-oriented economi (economy), and most of the traditional melinau (mills) that would have processed gwlân have closed.

You can learn about the history of Wales’ diwydiant gwlân in Carmarthenshire at Amgueddfa Wlân Cymru (the National Wool Museum).

The country’s history with defaid (sheep, plural) and their all-important gwlân is reflected in the number of ultra-specific terms for different kinds of gwlân that show up in dictionaries and oral histories, some of which are still used by farmers in Wales today.

• gwlân caglau = wool from a sheep’s tail
• gwlân rhoniau = wool from a sheep’s tail
• gwlân tocyn = wool shed by sheep, gathered by someone other than the farmer
• gwlân bras = coarse wool
• gwlân mân = fine wool
• gwlân rhywiog = fine wool

But my favourite expression related to gwlân is one which is now sadly outdated, given that he vast majority of processing of gwlân today happens in ffatrïoedd (factories). A wool-carding machine was once called in North Wales a cythraul gwlân – literally a wool demon!