How to Talk Like a Pirate in Welsh: 9 Words for 19 September

How do you say pirate in Welsh?

Môr-leidr is an unusually vivid compound. Môr means sea, while lleidr means thief. The second element appears in its softened form, so the finished word can be understood literally as "sea thief".

The hyphen and the circumflex matter in the standard spelling. The circumflex in môr marks a long vowel. This article does not turn Welsh sounds into rough English spellings because those guides can easily teach the wrong sound. A reliable Welsh audio dictionary or a Welsh speaker is a better model.

Why is the plural môr-ladron?

Welsh plurals do not all work by adding the same ending. The plural of lleidr is lladron. Inside the compound, the softened forms give môr-leidr for one pirate and môr-ladron for more than one.

That distinction is worth learning as a pair. It is more useful than guessing a regular plural later, and both forms appear in Welsh educational and news material about pirates.

How do you say "the black flag" in Welsh?

The phrase is y faner ddu. The dictionary form of flag is baner, but it is feminine. After the definite article y, the initial b soft-mutates to f, giving y faner. The adjective du, black, also soft-mutates after a feminine singular noun, giving ddu.

So y baner du is not the form to copy here. Y faner ddu shows two useful mutations in three short words.

Put the Welsh pirate words into sentences

Vocabulary becomes easier to remember when it has a job. These three short examples keep the grammar visible:

• Mae'r môr-leidr ar y llong. The pirate is on the ship.
• Mae'r capten a'r criw ar y llong. The captain and the crew are on the ship.
• Mae'r môr-leidr yn chwilio am drysor. The pirate is looking for treasure.

In the final example, the dictionary form trysor becomes drysor after the preposition am. If you meet cerdded y planc, it means "walk the plank" or, more literally, "walking the plank" in this dictionary-style form.

Is Talk Like a Pirate Day an old tradition?

No. The official history says John Baur and Mark Summers first had the idea while playing racquetball on 6 June 1995. They chose 19 September as the annual date, and the observance became much more widely known after they contacted humour columnist Dave Barry in 2002. The official site describes 19 September as the date every year since 2002.

The day is modern and playful, but Wales also has real pirate history. A 2025 S4C report uses môr-leidr, môr-ladron, llong, capten and baner in its account of Barti Ddu, Bartholomew Roberts. Historic piracy involved theft and violence, so a vocabulary game should not be mistaken for the history itself.

The timing is strongly seasonal online. In Wikimedia's global English-language pageview data for 2016 to 2025, September was the busiest month for the International Talk Like a Pirate Day article in every one of the ten years. Its average September total was about 87,848 pageviews, compared with about 6,154 in an average non-September month. This is a public-interest proxy, not Welsh search volume and not a prediction of traffic to this page.

Quick Welsh pirate-word check

For a small learning win on 19 September, choose three words and use one sentence rather than trying to memorise the whole table. If you are at the very beginning, start with ten easy Welsh words for beginners. After the novelty day, our guide to using Welsh at work offers practical ways to keep Welsh in an ordinary weekly routine.