The new blas. dictionary

It used to be a long list of words you scrolled through. Now it is one search box, at blasapp.com/dictionary, and it works more like a translator than a word list.

The rundown:

• One box, both directions - type Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Cornish or Manx, or type English
• It knows the grammar - mutated and conjugated words are traced back to the word you actually need
• Backed by real text - a quick check on how often a meaning shows up in real translated writing
• In ChatGPT and Claude - the same lookups, inside the AI tools you already use

One box, both directions

Pick a language, type a word, and blas works out which way you are going. Type bliain and you get "year". Type dog and you get madra, with the other Irish words for it underneath.

There are now over 75,000 entries across the six languages, with pronunciation and audio where we have them.

It knows the grammar

This is the part I wanted most. The word you meet in a sentence is often not the word in the dictionary. Chaint is caint after a mutation, and chuaigh is the past tense of téigh.

Most dictionaries leave you to work that out yourself. blas does it for you: type the word as you saw it, and it shows you the word it came from and says what changed. If you want to keep going, tap the original word to look that up too.

Backed by real text

Some meanings are used every day, and some only turn up in old books. So for Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Manx, blas checks each meaning against a large collection of real, openly licensed translated sentences.

If the meaning shows up a lot, you get a green "Backed by real text" line with the numbers. If it shows up a little, you get an amber one. If we have not seen enough text to say, we say nothing, rather than guess.

This is our own check, built on our own data. It does not copy anyone else's dictionary, and it is not a verdict on whether a word is right. It just tells you how much real writing we have seen using it.

In ChatGPT and Claude

A lot of people now ask an AI assistant what a word means. The trouble is that these assistants are not great at the Celtic languages, and mutations in particular trip them up.

So the blas dictionary also works inside them. You can add blas as a custom connector in ChatGPT or Claude, using https://blasapp.com/api/mcp, and the assistant will look words up in blas instead of guessing. It has two tools: one that looks up a word in any form, and one that points you to the right national dictionary for a second opinion.

Try it out at blasapp.com/dictionary and let me know what is missing. My email is info@blasapp.com, and I read everything.

- from john at blas.