quote:"dialann" for a diary
That is certainly the most common word for a personal diary. But there is another really nice term out there:
cín lae literally "book of day", "cín" being an otherwise archaic word for "book". The word "dialann" actually had a pretty dodgy start in the world. It was orignially "dia-lón" and meant "a day's ration". Actually, it was Risteard Pluincéad who invented the word as a translatlion of the Latin term "diarium" which has that meaning, esp. in the plural "diaria". Anyway, later dictionary makers mistook the meaning, since "diarium" can mean "daily journal" as well as "daily allowance", and they passed the word along as "dialon" and then "dialann". The latter form almost certainly arose because "lann" can mean "place", thus "day-place", which seemed to fit reasonably well with "diary".