lochsh

I'm an engineer with an interest in linguistics. I live in Oxford, UK, and I love learning about phonetics and phonology. I'm particularly interested in Japanese and Gaelic.

I have previously worked as a software engineer, writing Rust and Python for quantum computers, C++ for medical imaging diagnostics, and bare metal embedded C for surgical robots.

Pandaí or "pandy" for a tin mug or jug

Wed 25 February 2026

Childhood memories

My mother was talking about her childhood summers in rural Donegal, and used the word "pandy" to describe the tin drinking vessels she was often tasked with bringing to the men out working, along with a pail of water from the spring well to fill the vessels from. My culturally hungry ears pricked; could this be a Gaelic word? The initial p- marks it as a loan word — but from which language, and with what meaning?

a black and white photo taken in the 1960s showing three men in their 20s-30s, a young boy, and a woman in her late 20s. the men are drinking from glass bottles. the young boy is drinking from a tin mug, a 'pandy'.
My grandparents and two of my granny's brothers, with my uncle as a young boy. My uncle is drinking from a pandaí. The men, I am told, are drinking milky tea from glass bottles.

The word pandaí does not seem to appear in any major Irish dictionaries, but searching the digitised parts of Ireland's National Folklore Collection yields a few usages in Donegal. A selection:

a photo of a pandy made by John Doherty
A pandaí made by John Doherty, taken from Conor Thomas Caldwell's PhD thesis

My family only called the small drinking vessels "pandies", with larger tin vessels (as used for getting water from the well or collecting milk from the cows) called pails or buckets. There are examples of "pandy" also being used for these larger vessels:

These corroborating examples are pleasing, but do not get us any closer to understanding the origin of the word. There are a few usages of the word with divergent meanings that perhaps hold the key: in Munster, "pandy" appears to refer to mashed potatoes (see "poundies" in Ulster1), and some sources also use it to refer to receiving a beating. In fact, we find a version of pandaí with slenderised consonants as peaindí2 in Ó Dónaill's dictionary, with meanings "tin mug" and "mashed potatoes (with milk and butter)".

What do tin mugs, mashed potatoes, and physical beatings have in common? The clue is in the Ulster word "poundies" for mashed potato with sybies: all three involve pounding! Tin mugs are hammered into shape, potatoes are pounded into mash, and alas schoolchildren of yore were routinely whacked. It would seem to me that "pound" was borrowed into Irish to make pandaí, where in this instance the suffix -aí makes it "thing that is pounded" or (pleasingly) "poundee" — and then from there it was retained in some Hiberno-Englishes as "pandy".

To demonstrate the pounding: travelling tinsmiths would make things like pandies to sell. You can watch Johnny Doherty make one in the 1972 documentary Fiddler on the Road:

An alternative etymology

I was pleased with my above proposed etymology, but a subsequent discovery has me questioning it.

Collins' English dictionary defines "pandy" as "(in schools) a stroke on the hand with a strap as a punishment", and notes the term is primarily used in Scotland and Ireland3. The etymology is proposed as deriving from the imperative pande manum, Latin for "hold out [your] hand". This seems to have been issued to pupils by teachers, at a time when Latin was still used in schools, as described in James Wilson's Early Recollections of Life at King William's College on The Isle of Man. Both "pandy" and pande manum are used to refer to this punishment in various English language texts4.

So did "pandy" come to Irish via this restricted meaning, and spread in usage to other things that were struck? Or does the word "poundies" suggest that the usage for mashed potatoes at least evolved separately? I do stand by the idea that the tin mugs take their name from being struck during their manufacture, but whether this came from English "pound" or "pandy" (for a school beating), I cannot say.

Usages of pandaí or "pandy"

Map of usages of pandaí/pandy
Map of uses in Ireland of pandaí or "pandy". The markers have been somewhat roughly placed. The only usages I could find in Scotland or the Isle of Man were in English and referred to the school punishment.

The Munster usage for a beating describes a horse's feet crushing a fox as having "made a pandy of him", which might just be referring to getting mashed like a potato.

Below is a list of usages of pandaí or "pandy" to mean something along the lines of "tin mug". All are from Donegal, except one from Mayo.

Other usages can be found by searching duchas.ie. The National Corpus of Irish also records "pandy" in a couple audio interviews that I haven't listed above.

The panda in the room

I should mention that "panda", for the animals, has been borrowed into Irish and the plural is pandaí. This is of course unrelated etymologically! 🐼

  1. Personally I've only ever called it "champ". I've seen "poundies" in Peadar O'Donnell's writing. Possibly it is used outside Ulster too, and it might not always refer to mashed potatoes and sybies. ↩

  2. I haven't found any clear record of anyone using this form for tin mugs. There are a couple usages of it in The National Corpus of Irish but I'm not sure what they're referring to. The first one is a food, I don't know about the second. ↩

  3. Thankfully corporal punishment was a thing of the past when I went to school, but my parents both received the belt as punishment. They had no recollection of the term "pandy" ever being used in relation to it. It is recorded in the DASG fieldwork in Inverness. ↩

  4. A non-exhaustive list of usages referring to hitting the hands with a strap or cane:

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