Known for the quality of our exports - beef, grain and dairy, to name a few - we’re also known for the richness of our words, many of them grown from the traditions of our land. Words like boreen and bog, shaped by livestock and life on the farm, and spalpeen, the wandering labourer, or callow, the low-lying grazing fields along a river’s edge.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise when I tell you that, as someone who writes for a living, I love words.

Funny or sad, big or small, the right ones can change your day. Some, like ‘I do’ or ‘It’s a boy’, can change your life.

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I like the ones we make up ourselves, like hangry, when you’re so hungry you’re in a rage, or hexpectation, when you’re hoping for the best but expecting the worst. And I love those that seem to mirror their meaning, like discombobulated, as chaotic as the feeling it describes, or twinkle, which sparkles just like the stars.

Home to many of the world’s most talented writers, we also have a gift for everyday expression and, with flattery being the most sincere form of imitation, it’s a compliment to see so many of our phrases adopted into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The most recent additions, published last month, include ah sure look (it), hollier, nip and, in case anyone forgets themselves, that reminder to put manners on.

Ireland’s culinary vocabulary is proving just as exportable. With no tariff – yet – on food and drink terms, the full Irish now joins earlier additions like Waterford’s beloved blaa and the late-night takeaway legend that is the spice bag. All washed down with the humble mineral of course, which also made the cut.

Fans of Derry Girls will be delighted to know that the word class, has been immortalised, which you could, of course, use to describe the debs, that rite of passage for final-year students, alongside timely advice not to act the maggot, so you don’t spend the next day feeling thoroughly morto.

Even our insults have found their place, and skanger, which the OED describes as a person displaying brash and loutish behaviour and wearing designer-style sports clothes, joins ludraman, first recorded in Ulysses. Proof, perhaps, that whilst language has its own seasons, some expressions never grow old.

Fans of Derry Girls will be delighted to know that the word class, has been immortalised, which you could, of course, use to describe the debs, that rite of passage for final-year students

And while we’ve given plenty of our own colour to the world’s vocabulary, we’re not the only nation contributing memorable expressions. Some languages have words so precise they capture experiences we’ve all had but have never quite managed to name.

Take the Japanese word age-otori, that particular disappointment you feel when you leave the hairdresser looking worse, not better, than when you went in.

Or the Mexican Spanish chingada, a far-off place where you banish people who annoy you. The kind of place you might send the friend who has tingo’ed – in the Pascuense language of Easter Island – so many of your possessions that there is nothing left to borrow.

And I’m sure I’m not alone, as I get older, in finding myself increasingly flustered – or tartled, as the Scots say – during those awkward moments when I fumble around trying to remember someone’s name.

But for the many words we use every day – some surveys suggesting that men use 2,000, while women use 10,000 – scholars, surprisingly, say the English language has only one word for love.

I’m not so sure about that, as I think there are many words, and many ways, in which we say it.

Drive carefully. Put your coat on. Text me when you get home. No, you have the last slice of cake, I couldn’t eat another thing.

And of course, not forgetting, three very important letters that may not look like much on the page, but carry weight all the same, and which too have found their place in the Oxford English Dictionary, as we send our neighbours a little bit of grá.

Something grown and shared, like the very best of what we produce.