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Original poster

Ruairidh spelling variations

154 replies

Scottishgirl85 · 31/07/2022 18:53

Just discovered our 3rd child is a boy after 2 girls!

Always loved Ruairidh (pronounced roo-ray). I'm Scottish, hubby English, we live in SE England.

Will Ruairidh just cause endless issues or should we be brave and go for it?

There are alternative slightly simpler spellings, such as:

  • Ruaridh (Scottish, but not technically correct spelling without the extra i)
  • Ruairi (Irish, but we're not Irish).

Please help!

(Note, Rory is a completely different name, not as keen)

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KirstenBlest · 22/08/2023 13:09

@Whoarethegrownups , the baby has been named Ruaridh, the thread is over a year old.

ditalini · 22/08/2023 13:31

inverness123 · 22/08/2023 12:55

Please don’t call him Ruaridh! If you’re going to go with the Gaelic spelling, why would you spell it wrong? To anyone with any Gaelic, this is really jarring because it breaks one of the fundamental rules of spelling in Gaelic - consonant clusters must be surrounded either by broad vowels (a, o, u) or a narrow vowels (e, i), not broad on one side and Gaelic on the other. So if a comes before r, it must be followed by an a, o or u, never an i. (E.g. Ruaradh, Ruarodh and Ruarudh all adhere to the rule even though they’re not correct spellings of the name, but if you have -idh before a condiment, you must have e or i before. )

I think Ruairidh is lovely, but as someone with basic Gaelic, I find Ruaridh really grating as it looks so wrong. Of course he’s not likely to meet that many Gaelic speakers, but if you don’t want the proper spelling I’d just go with Rory rather than using something that looks Gaelic but isn’t.

If you look for my post below and the replies to it you'll find out why we were both wrong about this 😄

As a fellow basic Gaelic-haver, I learned something.

LizzieAnt · 22/08/2023 14:17

Congratulations @Scottishgirl85 🧸

Original poster
Scottishgirl85 · 22/08/2023 21:02

Thanks everyone. Yes he's already called Ruaridh and we love it. It's a more modern spelling and the most popular version currently in Scotland so it made most sense to us :-)
@ThomasinaLivesHere go for it!

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