Finn

• Celtic root, designates fair hair.

• Germanic root, designates moist-swampy places and rotten smell.

• the Dubliner Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier who fell drunk from his ladder and dies. At his wake, a bottle of whiskey broke on his coffin and he came back to life. The event is depicted in a popular Irish-American street ballad from the 1850s called "Finnegan's Wake" (text and background information). Much of the text of the ballad is echoed in the first chapter of FW.

• Fionn mac Cumhail (earlier Finn or Find mac Cumail or mac Umaill, pronounced roughly "Finn mac Cool"): a legendary hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, also known in Scotland and the Isle of Man. The stories of Fionn and his followers, the Fianna, form the Fenian cycle, much of it supposedly narrated by Fionn's son, the poet Oisín. The Fenian Brotherhood took their name from these legends.
  • Finn Mac Cumhail is often portrayed as a giant; Joyce imagined him as a sleeping giant, interred in the Irish landscape, with his head beneath the Hill of Howth (Da hoved: head) and his toes sticking up at Castleknock.

• Huckleberry Finn: character in a book by Mark Twain, friend of Tom Sawyer

• fin: a colloquial term for the U.S. five dollar bill bearing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

• Finland

• Finn: a giant who, according to folk mythology, built the cathedral in Lund.

• Finn: a Frisian lord who appears in Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg.

• Finnegan: Fin (F, "end") + again: a circular conception of history

• s Michael Finnegan: "There was a man called Michael Finnigan/ He grew whiskers on his chinigan/ Along came the wind and blew them in again/ Poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again"

• finicky

• Finn again is awake: a reference to the common legend that great heroes of the past are not dead but merely asleep, ready to return in their country's hour of greatest need (e.g. King Arthur)