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Most Irish people refer to the language they speak everyday simply as English, although they know that it differs in some respects from standard English. The language spoken by a minority is called Irish Gaelic by scholars, but usually known as Irish. Until recently only scholars used the terms Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English to refer to the English language of Ireland. In North America, it is even referred to as "Irish", which is particularly unfortunate, as there is already a language of that name. My preferred term is Irish English, which is also the most commonly used by non-specialists, but this has the disadvantage that in speech it sounds the same as Irish-English, as in an Irish-English dictionary, i.e. one which gives the English meanings of words in Irish Gaelic.

This problem of terminology does not exist in the Irish language: Béarla is the word for English; and Gaeilge for Irish; Irish English is Béarla na hÉireann, the English language of Ireland.

If you find the above hard to grasp, you will understand why I called the book Greenspeak.

I also wanted to include words which have connections with Ireland, but are not well known there: furphy, foley, donnybrook, as well as words and meanings which were coined by Irish people, such as ideogram, electron and race.