• THE ORDER OF WORDS: The name of an occupation is often formed of more than one word: a word to identify the basic type of occupation and an additional descriptive word (or words) to identify it more specifically. For example, the English adjectival nouns coal and lead are sometimes used to further describe the basic occupation of a miner by specifying which type, a coal miner or a lead miner.
  In Welsh, most descriptive nouns and adjectives come after the nouns instead of before them. The Welsh word mwnwr (miner) precedes the word for glo (coal) or plwm (lead), so the occupations are described as mwnwr glo (coal miner) and mwnwr plwm (lead miner).
  Words that might be combined in this way are however shown individually in the List of Occupations.
   
• MUTATIONS: The section on the Welsh Alphabet states that the first letter of a word should 'mutate' or change under certain rules of grammar to a different letter or letters. But a householder didn't always follow those rules when completing the census schedule. For example, instead of the unmutated word gweithio, some householders wrongly used its mutated form and wrote weithio. To allow for this, both gweithio and weithio are listed separately.
  If you can't find a word you're looking for, the Reverse Mutations table at the bottom of this page shows if the word's initial letters suggest it might have been mutated. You can open a copy of this table in a separate window in your browser, to keep it in view and refer to more easily.
   
• THE USE OF VERBS: The more specific description in English can take the form of the 'present participle' of a verb such as working, as in 'working on farm', i.e. a 'farm worker'. But there is no present participle in the Welsh grammar when verbs are declined. Instead, the infinitive form of the verb can be used instead, such as
  gweithio (which literally means to work);
  but you will also find other forms, such as the 'present impersonal' tense
  gweithir (which literally means works), or gweithis.
   
• PLURAL FORMS: Plurals may sometimes be found as part of an occupation, such as Taking care of horses. In English, plurals are generally formed simply by adding an 's' to the singular, but there are many different ways in which plurals are formed in Welsh. For example:
  ffermwr and ffarmwr (farmer) become ffermwyr and ffarmwyr (farmers);
  fferm (farm) becomes ffermydd (farms);
  ceffyl (horse) becomes ceffylau (horses).
   
• MALE OR FEMALE: In some cases, the ending of a word used in Welsh for a female differs from the ending used for a male. For example:
  a male worker is gweithiwr (or gweithwr) and a female worker is gweithwraig (or gweithreg).
   
• "WENGLISH": Some occupations appear to have been completed in a mixture of Welsh and English words. In most of these cases the English can be a translation or partial translation of the entry in Welsh, for example Gof Blacksmith.
   
• ALTERNATIVE ENGLISH WORDS: Some Welsh words have more than one meaning. For example:
  Masnachwr is a Shopkeeper, Merchant, or Dealer, which have slightly different meanings in English;
  Pysgotwr can be a Fishmonger or a Fisherman, which have two distinct meanings in English.
   
• ALTERNATIVE WELSH WORDS: Conversely, there are many examples where two or more Welsh words translate to the same English word. For example:
  farm can be translated from fferm or ffarm, or even farm itself.
  In some cases, this reflects the differences in the language between North and South Wales:
  labourer is normally translated from llafurwr in North Wales and from labrwr in South Wales.
   
• PREPOSITIONS, DEFINITE ARTICLES, etc: An occupation is sometimes described in Welsh by including the definite article or preposition, or both, as is shown in the "The", "And" and Prepositions table at the bottom of this page.
  

THE OPTIONS AVAILABLE IN COMBINING THE ABOVE ALTERNATIVES

That is why, instead of translating each Welsh entry literally, individual word by individual word, it is often better to 'generalise' an occupation. In other words, the equivalent phrase most commonly used in English censuses for that particular occupation is substituted for the literal translation. Doing this is far less confusing, and enables the Occupation Field to be used as part of an Advanced Fields Search.

The numeric codes written against each entry by the census clerks, to identify Types of Occupation, may help to narrow down the range of possibilities. A list of these Occupation Codes can be found on the 1911 Census web site and on Findmypast's Knowledge Base for the 1911 census. Because Findmypast have filmed the Schedules in colour, the numeric codes are more easily decipherable than on earlier censuses.