Nia is an aspiring writer from Powys, Wales. She attended Welsh-medium primary and secondary school, and is passionate about preserving the beautiful Welsh language and culture. She speaks some French, and is currently learning Arabic.
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 …
A couple of months ago, we shared an article about the word unig (only or lonely). And today’s word is actually based on that one. We’re going to talk through the word unigolyn, meaning an individual. This is a masculine noun. It’s perfectly fine to use it to describe women, too, but even in these …
Adeg is a bit of a hard one to translate, because it doesn’t correspond perfectly to any single English word. Really it means time, but only in a very specific sense. Time in the abstract sense that usually first comes to mind is amser, as in expressions such as amser maith yn ôl (a long …
Today’s Welsh word of the day is gwisgo, which has four similar but subtly different meanings. Firstly, it can mean to dress oneself or someone else in dillad (clothing). Secondly, it can mean to dress or to decorate something. Thirdly, it can mean to put on a specific piece of dillad. Fourthly, it can mean …
Talking about teulu (family) is often one of the first things you want to do in a new language. Once you’ve learnt the terms for your closest perthnasau (relations) – mam (mother), tad (dad), chwaer (sister), and brawd (brother) being particularly important – one word that’s likely to be near the top of your list …
They say a llun (picture) paints a thousand geiriau (words), and indeed this very sentiment is expressed in the Welsh idiom cyfwerth llun a llith (a picture has the same worth as a lecture). On the other hand, our one gair (word) of the day today, llun, could refer to a thousand different kinds of …
Today, we’re going to talk about the humble hen. The Welsh word for a hen, often used more broadly to refer to the whole species of chickens, is iâr. The plural form of iâr is ieir (hens / chickens). iâr a hen ieir hens / chickens Iâr is a very old word in Welsh. We …
A lot of Welsh words are borrowed from English. Stereotypically, we imagine this as having happened very recently – the younger generation adopting English slang, or people taking English words for new technologies. But it’s actually been happening for hundreds of years, and many Welsh borrowings of English words have transformed in such a way …
Our Welsh word of the word today is cyfarfod, which is both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it means to meet, and as a noun, it means a meeting – as in the kind that you have yn y gwaith (at work). The plural form of the noun is cyfarfodydd. cyfarfod to …
One of the trickiest things you have to keep watching out for as a language learner is false friends – words that look the same as a word in your native language or another language you speak, but mean something completely different. One example of this phenomenon between Welsh and English is brain, which in …
