It’s a well-known fact that British people eat a lot of boiled food – from potatoes, to meat, to vegetables like carrot and peas. Still, the most common use of boiling in the UK has surely got to be boiling the kettle to make a cup of tea. The Welsh word for the verb to boil is berwi.
berwi
boil
Berwi actually stems from the form berw, which as an adjective means boiled, or as a noun, refers to the state of boiling or a boiling liquid. Berw traces its roots back to the Proto-Indo-European root word bhrewh, which also gave rise to English words like brew and bread.
Berwi is the most common word for boiling in Welsh, although barferwi might occasionally be used as well. In the South-East, the word brwdu can be used, but only in reference to a kettle.
You can use the word lledferwi to refer to boiling something slightly (similar to simmering or parboiling), and berwi drosodd or gorferwi to refer to something which is boiling over.
Here’s how berwi mutates:
Soft mutation
ferwi
Nasal mutation
merwi
Aspirate mutation
N/A
It might be helpful to become familiar with some common conjugations of berwi. In everyday spoken Welsh, conjugations are not that complicated, because it’s common to use periphrastic conjugations – this just means leaving the verb in its basic form and changing parts of the rest of the sentence to reflect the tense.
Still, there are some conjugations that are commonly used even in casual conversation, which you can find in the table below. Don’t be alarmed if you hear slight variations in these regionally!
| Past preterite | Future | Future conditional | |
| First person singular | Berwais i | Berwa i / berwaf i | Berwn i |
| First person plural | Berwon ni | Berwn ni | Berwen ni |
| Second person singular / informal | Berwaist ti / berwest ti | Berwi di | Berwet ti / berwset ti |
| Second person plural / formal | Berwoch chi | Berwch chi | Berwech chi |
| Third person singular | Berwodd o/e/hi | Berwith o/e/hi | Berwai fo/fe/hi / berwsai fo/fe/hi |
| Third person plural | Berwon nhw | Berwan nhw | Berwen nhw |
Another useful one to know is the imperative, berwa (to one person whom you are familiar with), or berwch (to multiple people, or to one person with whom you speak formally).
Berwon ni’r moron i gyd.
We boiled all of the carrots.
Here are some more everyday phrases using the word berwi:
- does dim berwi arno = it won’t boil
- dod i’r berw = to come to the boil
- ar y berw / ar ferwi = at the boil
- bron â berwi = just below the boil
- pwynt berwi / pwynt berwedig = boiling point
You’ll definitely have to learn the difference between these if you’re planning to use any Welsh cookbooks!
After boiling the kettle (berwi’r tegell), you’ll end up with boiling water (dŵr berw). You could use this to make a cup of tea (paned o de) or a cup of coffee (paned o goffi). In the evening (noswaith) you might have a cup of chamomile tea (te gamil) before bed, or in the bore (morning) you might prefer green tea (te gwyrdd) for energy.
Learn how to make a cup of tea in Welsh!
Note that here I’ve used tegell for kettle. This is will be understood throughout Wales, but tecell is also common, especially further North. There are plenty of synonyms, from similar variants like tegil and tecetl to the jocular personification Morgan, as in, mae Morgan yn canu (the kettle is singing).
You can also boil milk (llaeth in the South and llefrith in the North) instead of dŵr to make llaeth poeth (hot milk) or siocled poeth (hot chocolate). Boiling milk might also be a step in the recipe (ryseit) for plenty of desserts (pwdinau / melysfwydydd).
Rhaid i ti godi’r llaeth i ferwi.
You must bring the milk to the boil.
The word berwi has a couple of idiomatic and non-literal meanings as well. It can refer to someone who is very angry or fuming (mae o’n berwi, he is very angry), or to someone who is very rich (mae hi’n berwi mewn arian, she has a lot of money).
It can also describe something teeming with life, but only if it’s filled with living things, such as animals or plants. For example, a forest could be berwi o bryfed (full of insects). This usage is akin to the English word overflowing.
Lastly, there’s the lovely idiom berwi fel cawl pys, which literally translates to boiling like pea soup, and is used to describe someone who keeps talking endlessly about something—hopefully you don’t think I’ve been berwi fel cawl pys about the word berwi!
There is a well-known Welsh folk song called Sosban Fach (Little Saucepan) with slightly nonsensical lyrics about a series of things going wrong in a household – it was adapted from an older poem about how difficult it is to be a housewife! The chorus of the song goes like this: Sosban fach yn berwi ar y tân, sosban fawr yn berwi ar y llawr, a’r gath wedi sgramo Joni bach.
This means, The little saucepan is boiling on the fire, the big saucepan is boiling on the floor, and the cat has scratched little Johnny. As you can see, these lyrics don’t really make that much sense, but we all thought they were very funny as school children.
