At the end of the nineteenth century in West Limerick, Timothy O’Neill Lane, listened to those around him speaking in Irish and spent twenty years collecting their words in order to publish his first English Irish dictionary in 1904.
Timothy O’Neill Lane was born in 1852 in Ahane, Co. Kerry to a prosperous farmer but moved to with his family to Templeglantine as a young child. He attended school at Templeglantine National School and would become a teacher there from 1871 to 1877. His sister also taught in the school. He was only five foot eight inches tall, with black hair, blue eyes and sallow skin. He was also born with a deformity in his foot, which caused him to fail his medical when applying for the civil service.
O’Neill Lane instead became a clerk to the Incorporated Law Society in London. Although this position was secure, it did not cure his appetite for knowledge. Therefore, within a very short time he found himself as a journalist with the Times of London and soon travelled to Paris where he worked as a correspondent and writer of travel books. He returned to London and then to Ireland, where he continued his work as a journalist and travel writer while recording information for his future dictionary.
O’Neill Lane married twice, and there was an air of mystery surrounding both of his wives. He married Mary O’Neill, his first cousin, in London in 1878, and she died later that year after suffering a miscarriage after a bicycle accident. He married for a second time in 1888, to twenty-two-year-old Londoner, Dorette Annie Ayley. In 1891, the couple and their two children Dorette and Timothy were living in Paddington, London. He was recorded as both a journalist and author on the census for that year.
It was during this time that O’Neill Lane began focusing more on his collection of folklore in Ireland. As he travelled, his wife and daughter remained in England and his son left London for West Limerick where he spent a few years before travelling to Australia to live with his aunt.
In 1897, during one of his exploratory tours, O’Neill Lane found himself in Sligo. Here he was imprisoned for shooting at and wounding a woman, Catherine Early and a boy, Bernard Magee while attempting to shoot crows on a public street while drunk. He was released on bail after nine days, paid a fine to the court and compensation to the victims.
Around 750 C.E., an anonymous Irish student studying in Germany decided to make notes in Irish next to the Latin text in one of his books. This was the first known attempt at an Irish translation guide. Several Irish to Latin dictionaries were created after this, but the first Irish to English dictionary was not compiled until the eighteenth century.
O’Neill Lane not only saw a gap in the market but also sought to feed his own curiosity by compiling his dictionary.
On July 14, 1956, the Limerick Leader published information given by his niece Mrs Ellen D Collins Abbeyfeale Hill, Abbeyfeale, who is a niece of the late Timothy O’Neill Lane. She tells of how a friend visited the British Museum Library, London, and “while walking round the great circular reading room looking at the thousands of books of reference on the shelves his eye caught the title ‘English-Irish Dictionary by T. O’Neill Lane’.”
Collins thought that her uncle would have appreciated this, as “only the best books on different subjects are kept in the reading room for the convenience of the students.” She goes on to mention that her “uncle spent £2,500 collating material for his dictionary, £300 in compilation and £350 in other expenses. The only aid he received towards the publication was a grant from the British Government of £250.” This would be equivalent to more than €325,000 today.
As soon as his 581-page work was published in 1904, O’Neill Lane expressed dissatisfaction with it and began working on the second edition. He managed to gather a list of over 600 subscribers for this second edition, which was well over double the size of the first at 1,748 pages.
The first proof of his dictionary arrived to him the day before he passed away from Bright’s Disease on May 8, 1915 at his cousin’s house in Tour, Co. Limerick. The second edition was published shortly after his death. It was as useful publication as at the time of its release the Gaelic League were enjoying a revival and educators and scholars bought the dictionary to enhance their knowledge of their native language.
In 2015, to mark the centenary of Timothy O’Neill Lane’s death Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh wrote The West Limerick Man Who Wrote a Dictionary: T. O’Neill Lane and a new memorial was raised over his grave in Brosna, Co. Kerry.