1. The name means "small body"

   The word is usually traced to the Old Irish luchorpán, built from lú (small) and corp (body). Over the centuries it wandered through spellings like lubrican and lepracaun before settling down.

2. They first appear in an 8th-century tale

   The earliest known leprechauns turn up in The Adventure of Fergus son of Léti, where water sprites try to drag a sleeping king into the sea. He catches three of them, and they buy their freedom by granting him wishes.

3. Leprechauns are cobblers

   In folklore they spend their days mending shoes. Listen for the tap of a tiny hammer under a hedge, and you may have found one. Some tales say they only ever work on a single shoe, never a pair.

4. They used to wear red

   Nineteenth-century writers usually dressed leprechauns in red coats and cocked hats. The all-green outfit became the standard look only in the twentieth century.

5. They prefer their own company

   W. B. Yeats sorted Irish fairies into the trooping kind, who live in groups, and the solitary kind. The leprechaun is firmly solitary, along with his cousins the clurichaun and the far darrig.

6. Never look away

   Catch a leprechaun and he must lead you to his treasure, but only as long as you keep your eyes on him. Blink or glance aside, and he is gone, usually leaving you with a field full of identical markers.

7. There is a night-shift cousin

   The clurichaun is said to come out after the cobbler has gone to bed. He haunts wine cellars, rides sheep by moonlight, and keeps the barrels from leaking, as long as the household keeps him supplied.

8. A colony lives in Portland, Oregon

   Mill Ends Park, a circle of soil about two feet across, is often called the smallest park in the world. Its creator, newspaper columnist Dick Fagan, claimed it was home to a leprechaun colony, and the city still celebrates it every St Patrick's Day.