From Diarmaid Ó Muirithe's vast store of words and glosses, here is a bumper collection of favourite words, some on the verge of extinction, many of them dialect words, all worthy of collection in case they soon join the words classed in the dictionaries as obsolete.

Language is constantly shifting and changing. English is more susceptible to this process than most languages, drawing as it does on vast stores of loan words from other languages and dialects. For instance, linguists reckon that - at the current rate of change - British and American English could become mutually incomprehensible within a few centuries, or at least they could drift apart like Irish and Scots Gaelic so that there was only partial comprehension between the two.

Diarmaid Ó Muirithe's popular books, their scholarship worn with lightness and wit, are the perfect companion to this shifting world of words and language.