About

The manuscript, Codex Paulinus Wirziburgensis, contains the Latin text of the epistles of St. Paul. Marginal and interlinear glosses explaining this text have been added to the codex in three distinguishable scribal hands. Dating from about the middle of the eighth century, these glosses comprise one of the earliest large bodies of text written in Irish.

The purpose of this site is to make to make the Würzburg Irish glosses available in digital format. The digital text is based on the edition of the glosses available in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, Vol. 1 (Stokes and Strachan, 1901). Here the editors present 3,501 glosses which include Irish content, noting however, that further glosses have apparently been lost due to the age of the manuscript, and the process of its binding.

Copyright © 2024 Adrian Doyle

Reuse of any of the contents of this database is licensed under: CC BY 4.0

The following resources are referenced throughout this website's commentary on the glosses:

  • Bergin, Osborn. (1928). Notes on the Würzburg glosses. Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 17, 223–224.
  • Bisagni, Jacopo. (2013). Prolegomena to the Study of Code-Switching in the Old Irish Glosses. Peritia, 24-25, 1–58
  • Breen, Aidan. (1996). The Biblical Text and Sources of the Würzburg Pauline Glosses (Romans 1–6). In Próinséas Ní Chatháin, and Michael Richter (Eds.), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur / Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Learning and Literature (pp. 9–16). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart.
  • de Paor, John Liam. (Ed.). (2016). The Earliest Irish Glosses on the Pauline Epistles. Herder, Freiburg.
  • Kavanagh, Séamus, and Dagmar S. Wodtko. (Eds.). (2001). A Lexicon of the Old Irish Glosses in the Würzburg Manuscript of the Epistles of St. Paul. Mitteilungen der Prähistorischen Kommission 45, Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
  • McCone, Kim. (1997). The Early Irish Verb (2nd ed.). An Sagart, Maynooth.
  • Ní Chatháin, Próinséas. (1987). Notes on the Würzburg glosses. In P. Ní Chatháin & M. Richter (Eds.), Irland und die Christenheit: Bibelstudien und Mission / Ireland and Christendom: the Bible and the Missions (pp. 190–199). Klett-Cotta.
  • Ó Néill, Pádraig P. (2002). The Old-Irish Glosses of the Prima Manus in Würzburg, m.p.th.f.12: Text and Context Reconsidered. In Michael Richter and Jean-Michel Picard (Eds.), Ogma: Essays in Celtic Studies in Honour of Próinséas Ní Chatháin (pp. 230–242). Four Courts Press, Dublin.
  • Stokes, Whitley, and John Strachan. (Eds.). (1901). Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (Vol. 1). The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin.
  • Stokes, Whitley, and John Strachan. (Eds.). (1903). Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (Vol. 2). The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin.
  • A Supplement to Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus. (1975). In Whitley Stokes, and John Strachan (Eds.), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (Vol. 2, 1975 reprint) (pp. 423-506). The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin.
  • Thurneysen, Rudolf. (1946) A Grammar of Old Irish (D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin, Trans.; 2nd ed.). The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin.
  • TITUS: Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien, Online: Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Link Here.
  • Zimmer, Heinrich. (1881). Glossae Hibernicae e Codicibus Wirziburgensi, Carolisruhensibus, Aliis. Weidmann, Berlin.


Any mention of "the manuscript" or "the facsimile" in the site notes section beneath a gloss should be understood to reference the digital images available on the TITUS website. Similarly, the term "TPH Supplement" is used in the site notes to reference A Supplement to Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus from the 1975 reprint of Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus Vol. 2. Where "the Cambridge Pauline glosses" are referenced, this relates to the content of Cambridge manuscript B.10.5, available online at The James Catalogue of Western Manuscripts.

The following abbreviations are also used:

  • GOI - A Grammar of Old Irish.
  • TPH - Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus.
  • ZCP - Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie.


Where part-of-speech information is available for a gloss this site uses the following part-of-speech tags which are aligned with the Universal Dependencies tag-set:

  • ADJ: adjective
  • ADP: adposition (prepositions and conjugated prepositions)
  • ADV: adverb
  • AUX: auxiliary (copula forms)
  • CCONJ: coordinating conjunction
  • DET: determiner (definite articles, pronominal adjectives, etc.)
  • INTJ: interjection
  • NOUN: noun
  • NUM: numeral
  • PART: particle (relative particle, demonstrative particles, preverbs, etc.)
  • PRON: pronoun (independent personal, infixed, posessive, anaphoric, indefinite, reflexive, etc.)
  • PROPN: proper noun
  • PUNCT: punctuation
  • SCONJ: subordinating conjunction
  • SYM: symbol
  • VERB: verb
  • X: other