Bad Crack

The word crack ("craic") wasn't popular
in the south of Ireland until the 1980s

Elaine Walsh, who apparently lives in Dublin and writes for a website called 'Ireland Fun Facts' has dropped the ball on this one. I have no idea if the rest of her 'Facts' are as inaccurate as that one.

Walsh makes several erroneous claims on her page attempting to explain the word 'craic'.

She's correct about the pronunciation, ironically.

But she fails to point out that Christy Moore used the original English spelling of this English language word, in his song, 'The Crack Was Ninety On The Isle Of Man'.

Walsh claims, "Craic is a Gaelic word, with no exact English translation." Wrong again, Elaine. Craic is definitely a Gaelic word, but it has been borrowed from the English word crack. Therefore, it most definitely has a direct English translation - it was, in fact, translated FROM English in the first place!

Walsh claims that the GAELIC word "craic" doesn't appear in standard ENGLISH dictionaries. Nope Elaine, but the word crack, from whence the word craic stems, does!

The word crack is an old Middle English word with several meanings. Many, if not all, of the meanings are related. Scots, or Lallans, is a dialect of English. It contains words and grammatical structure which originates from languages other than English. It is a living and growing dialect. Gaelic languages, particularly Irish and Scottish Gaelic, are also living and growing languages. As such, a word for computer in Gaelic was developed: ríomaire. This may come from an already existing Gaelic word, ríomhaireacht, which means ‘calculation’.

Centuries ago, the word crack took on another meaning: to talk or gossip. The word comes through Middle English crak(k) from the Old English cracain derived from the Germanic verb kraken (noun krak). It was used in northern England and southern Scotland. It was from there that the word was probably introduced to Ulster from settlers who moved there and the later Planters.

As an evolving language though, many English words dropped out of mainstream usage. Many of these older words however survived in Ulster and continued to be used by the descendants of settlers and adopted by locals. Crack is one such word. It continued to be used in the Scottish/English border right through the nineteenth century.

James Melville was a Presbyterian cleric in Scotland who lived from 1556 until 1614. He kept a diary, which has been published. One entry of 1583, in part, reads:

Sa we go to dinner in Mr James Lawsone’s hous, wha with all his gheasts war exceiding heavie harted, and often-tymes could nocht contein, bot mix thair teares with thair drink. Onlie Mr Andro eat, drank, and crakked als merrelie and frie-myndit as at anie tyme, and mair; (Melville, 1583)

A note in the footer of the publication helpfully tells us what is meant by ‘crakked’: Talked or conversed cheerfully. Here we have one of the first recorded uses of the word in the sense that it is used today in Ireland, and in parts of Scotland and northern England. A word that has recently been adopted into another, more ancient, language.

The word continued to be used throughout the subsequent centuries. Sir James Semple (or Sempill) of Belltrees in Renfrewshire, Scotland was a poet in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. It was in the sense of gossip or talk that Semple used the word in one of his poems dated to c.1590-1610.

We Merchandis all that with our Merchand pakkis

Did trauell ay, fra Towne to Towne, to Fairis

Thow hes vs baneist. Tho hes vs fleit fra crakkis

We sit at hame na sail is to our wairis. (Semple, 1590)

In 1785, a poem by Robert Burns included the word, again in the same context of fun gossip and chat.

Now Clinkumbell, wi' rattlin tow,
Begins to jow an' croon;
Some swagger hame the best they dow,
Some wait the afternoon.
At slaps the billies halt a blink,
Till lasses strip their shoon:
Wi' faith an' hope, an' love an' drink,
They're a' in famous tune
For crack that day.

Walter Scott, in his book Rob Roy first published in 1817, used the word in the sense of fun, gossip or chatting, twice:

I shall look after this, Stanchells, you may depend on't—Keep the door locked, and I'll speak to these gentlemen in a gliffing—But first I maun hae a crack wi' an auld acquaintance here.— Mr. Owen, Mr. Owen, how's a' wi' ye, man? (Scott, 2001 p. 71)

[and later] Ane Captain Costlett was cracking crouse about his loyalty to King Charles, and Clerk Pettigrew (ye'll hae heard mony a tale about him) asked him after what manner he served the king, when he was fighting again him at Wor'ster in Cromwell's army;

A publication of this work in 2001 included a helpful glossary in which it states that crack means gossip (and crouse means proudly and cracking crouse means boasting).

In the 1960s, Barney Rush released a song called, ‘The Crack Was Ninety on the Isle of Man’. Christy Moore, when he released the same song in 1978 (as already mentioned), used the same spelling. It wasn’t until 2006 that a group from Dublin, The Dubliners, spelled it differently with their release of the song.

The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has apparently traced its usage to even earlier:

crack- to talk loud, to boast, etc. 1460, Scot. and northern England. Also spelt crake.
crack- brisk talk, news, gossip, to chatter sociably. 1450, northern England and Scot.

The word became popular throughout Ulster. It was, in fact, rarely known or used further south. It was probably introduced to Ulster before or during the Plantation period.

For some Gaelic speakers, the claim that the word originated in that language is an annoyance. Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, a writer for the Irish Times newspaper, wrote that, “the constant Gaelicisation of the good old English-Scottish dialect word crack as craic sets my teeth on edge”, in his book ‘The Words We Use’. (Ó Muirithe, 2006 pp. 154-5) Irish traditional musician Fintan Vallely suggested similar annoyance by the use of the word 'craic' in 1999, in his book, ‘Companion to Irish Traditional Music’. (Vallely, 1999 p. 91) Vallely, who played music frequently both north and south of the border, states that he had never heard the word spoken in Dublin until the late 1980s.

Another journalist for the Irish Times, Frank McNally, said that “most Irish people now have no idea it’s foreign [sic]”. (McNally, 2005) By “foreign”, McNally means English, which is the de facto language of the Republic of Ireland.

Crack: Now a commodity re-spelled
and sold across the oceans

In the last two or three decades, the word crack, spelled in Gaelic as craic, has become so commonly used in Dublin that many people have started to believe that the idea or context of the word originated in Ireland and in Irish Gaelic specifically. The more stubborn amongst them believe that somehow their word ‘craic’ has somehow been hijacked by those nasty Unionists from the North. In fact, the word didn’t originate anywhere in Ireland, but its use in Ulster remained widespread, amongst unionists and non-unionists alike. So stringent have they been in their blind faith that the word must be Gaelic in origin, some have attempted to scour the lexicon for similarly spelled Gaelic words to exhibit their rationale. So much so that one such excuse even extended to the phrase ag buaileadh craicinn, meaning “to make love”. The rationale in that case was that ag buaileadh craicinn is a fun thing to do! However, neither craicáille nor craic appear in O’Brien’s Irish-English Dictionary, or O’Reilly’s in the 1800s or Dineen’s of 1927, or even in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language in 1983.

Crack: Now a commodity re-spelled
and sold across the oceans

Irish myth is particularly marketable. Arguably, this has been the saviour of the Republic of Ireland’s economy, most visible in its form as tourism. The notion of drunken brawls in Irish pubs, of drunken, merrily-singing Irishmen, of leprechauns, freckles, the colour green, and of red hair has been sold and bought, bought and sold. In more recent decades, attempts have been made at reinventing Irish culture. But even such a spectacular as Riverdance is not without its flaws. Movies have started to create a more edgy stereotype of Irish males, one in which they appear to have a chip on their shoulder and an attitude to match – not so merry any more, but certainly with a readiness for a brawl. A perfect antihero for this era’s plethora of antihero-based movies. The suggestion appears to be that the Irish man is only that full of aggro because of what the nasty ‘Brits’ have done to him, or to his family. If it wasn’t for the Brits, he would have no need to be that tough, and he is, in fact, just a loveable, cuddly teddy bear with a wicked sense of humour when his guard is down.

He is full of the craic. Fun in a pub, chatter and gossip, are all, it would seem, traits only to be found amongst Irish people. Or perhaps in Irish theme bars. Nobody knows how to have fun properly, besides Irish people: they even have a word for that specific type of fun – a type of fun which transcends, and is culturally superior to (and at the same time ancient), that of any other collection of people.

Like the stereotyping, craic is a commodity that has been sold by Irish southerners to themselves, to the rest of the British Isles and to the USA and beyond. Buses advertise the word, spelled craic in Belfast, replacing the original English spelling with this adopted and commoditised Gaelic version. There isn’t much protest or argument from people in Ulster as it either fits their political point of view, or it’s considered perhaps a trivial matter or, more likely, because it wasn’t a word which was often written down. It is considered slang rather than a bone fide word, used regularly in everyday speech and not much at all in formal writing. Yet some writers from Northern Ireland, such as Brian Friel, have indeed used the word in novels and plays, and have spelled the word crack.

While the word became less used and more archaic in northern England, it was still being used at least until the late 1970s there, as evidenced by the use of a traditional English song as the theme tune to a popular TV show starring James Bolam, ‘When The Boat Comes In’. The song, called ‘Dance Ti’ Thy Daddy’, was released as a single by the BBC and the lyrics use the word crack (modified with a ‘Y’ for poetic reason) in the sense of fun and chat.

Come here me little Jackie
Now av smoked me baccy
Let wer hav a cracky
Till the boat comes in

The word seems to be used more often in the Republic of Ireland as a noun, whereas it’s used as both a noun and a verb in Northern Ireland and in Scotland and the north of England. The word craic appeared in an Irish-English Dictionary in 1987. This would seem to tally with Fintan Vallely’s experience with the word.


Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Urban Dictionary has mostly got it wrong too.


A music website even goes to the trouble of re-spelling the word throughout the original Barney Rush song, despite a copy of the sheet music on the same page showing us the original spelling.