These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
Baile Átha Cliath· Irish · main form · validated name
Dublin· English · main form
Place & story
A county beside the city
Lewis’s 1837 county article describes a maritime Leinster county adjoining Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. It reports population explicitly excluding the metropolis. His separate city entry treats Dublin as a city and county of itself. These are not interchangeable totals or areas. A family document saying Dublin may refer to a city street, a rural parish, a coastal settlement or a jurisdiction whose boundary needs to be established from its date.[2][3]
Fingal and older regional names
The directory uses Fingal when discussing the district north of the Liffey and records other proposed ancient names and territorial divisions. Those references belong to a historical account with several layers of certainty. Its confident early tribal identifications and sweeping statements about medieval populations should not be treated as direct evidence of a particular family’s origin. A regional name can help locate a document without supplying the ancestry of everyone later living within it.[2]
Swords as a local example
The Swords entry shows a distinct ecclesiastical manor and market town on the northern road, with a stream leading towards the Malahide inlet. It belonged to the county’s network of local centres rather than simply to the capital’s streets. For research, retain the civil parish, street or townland, institution and denomination. Do not replace a historical county reference with an unspecified modern administrative area, or infer city residence merely because Dublin appears as the nearest major place.[4]
Figures cover the whole county including its cities. CSO recommends this series for long-term comparison, although minor boundary changes have occurred.
View population figures
County Dublin, including its cities — census population
placenames