Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about the leprechauns and the equinox.

It's the time of year for shamrocks, green beer, and tiny bearded men guarding pots of gold.

So today we're going to look at the word

leprechaun, and I have to tell you, the origin is wilder than you might expect. It involves

shoemaking, ancient Rome, wolfman, and more than one competing theory. Today, a leprechaun is a

mischievous Irish elf that will take you to his hidden treasure if you can catch him,

a little guy in green with buckled shoes in a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But that's actually a relatively modern image, and the word itself has a long entangled history.

In older Irish tradition, leprechauns were associated with water, not just rainbows, and nobody

was dressing them in green.

In fact, in the late 1800s, William Butler Yates, the poet and folklorist, classified leprechauns

as solitary fairies and specifically said they wore red jackets.

Green, he said, was for the other trooping fairies.

So the first theory of how they got the name leprechaun has been backfilled from that modern story

because their fortune may come from being the cobbler to the stars,

mending the shoes of other fairies who dance so much they're constantly in need of repairs.

Or it could be that the leprechauns run around so much themselves, they're constantly wearing

out their own shoes. But either way, the best time to catch leprechauns is when they're working on a

shoe, because that's when they're in one place, and you can find them by the tap, tap, tap of their

hammer. And this is the important part. For whatever reason, leprechauns are almost always shown

working on just one shoe, not a pair of shoes.

Now, Brogue means shoe in Irish, and according to the website Irish myths, Douglas Hyde, the first president of Ireland, who was also a how cool is this, linguist and folklorist, promoted the idea that the name

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