Dublin (ˈdʌblᵻn; , ˈbɣaljə aːhə ˈcljiə or ˌbjljaː ˈcljiə) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2022 census, it had a population of 1,263,219, while County Dublin as a whole had a population of 1,458,154, and the population of the Greater Dublin Area was over 2 million, or roughly 40% of the Republic of Ireland's total population.
A settlement was established in the area by the Gaels during or before the 7th century, followed by the Vikings. As the Kingdom of Dublin grew, it became Ireland's principal settlement by the 12th century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest in the British Empire and sixth largest in Western Europe after the Acts of Union in 1800. Following independence in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, renamed Ireland in 1937. , the city was listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as a global city, with a ranking of "Alpha minus", which placed it among the top thirty cities in the world.
Other names of Dublin
The name Dublin derives from the Irish word Duibhlinn, early Classical Irish Dubhlind/Duibhlind, from dubh (d̪uβ, d̪uw, d̪uː) meaning "black, dark", and linn (ljiɲ(d̪j)) "pool", referring to a dark tidal pool. This tidal pool was located where the River Poddle entered the Liffey, on the site of the castle gardens at the rear of Dublin Castle. In Modern Irish the name is Duibhlinn, and Irish rhymes from County Dublin show that in Dublin Leinster Irish it was pronounced Duílinn ˈd̪ɣiːljiɲ. The original pronunciation is preserved in the names for the city in other languages such as Old English Difelin, Old Norse Dyflin, modern Icelandic Dyflinn and modern Manx Divlyn as well as Welsh Dulyn and Breton Dulenn. Other localities in Ireland also bear the name Duibhlinn, variously anglicised as Devlin, Divlin and Difflin.