06/10/2026
CONACHAG-GHIOMACH 🦀🐚
~ a hermit crab
Dictionary entry: https://www.faclair.ac.uk/entries/69
Occasionally we come across words that have only one attestation. That’s the case, for now at least, for CONACHAG-GHIOMACH.
Faclair editors are understandably cautious about dealing with words which lack evidence of usage. In this case, however, there are reasons to think that the source is reliable.
This word was collected in 1968 in fieldwork carried out by the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic (HDSG), now part of DASG.
The informant was Gibidh Mac a’ Chlèirich (Gilbert Clark) who was one of the most important tradition bearers in Islay in the 20th century, as well as being well-known as a boatbuilder. Gibidh appears on many of the Islay recordings now available through Tobar an Dualchais ~ Kist o Riches. He also left valuable word lists to HDSG.
The word itself is made up of CONACHAG, a whelk, and GIOMACH, a lobster. This is a reasonable term for the hermit crab which is not a true crab and resembles a small lobster without its shell. They are also called GIOMAICH, lobsters, in other dialects, e.g. Giomach-tuathal – Ardhasaig, Harris.
Interestingly, there is also a similar term in the Scots of Buchan in : lobster buckie – which means, literally, a whelk lobster: https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/lapster
🦀🐚 Have you ever heard this word? 🦀🐚
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Image description: Hermit crab, Belgium. Photograph by Hans Hillewaert (2005) – CC BY-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pagurus_bernhardus.jpg
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