Hawaiian boy names
Most Hawaiian boy names are ordinary Hawaiian phrases with the space taken out. Keanu is ke anu, the cool breeze; Kekoa is ke koa, the warrior; Kealoha is ke aloha, the love. Learn which article goes where and a whole shelf of names opens at once. Meanings below follow the Pukui and Elbert dictionary tradition, and the display forms keep the ʻokina and the kahakō that American paperwork usually strips. More traditions at the origins index.
Hawaiian names the mainland knows
Exactly one Hawaiian name sits in the current U.S. top 100, and it is the shortest. Everything else here is outside it — widely recognised, warmly regarded, and given in far smaller numbers than the recognition suggests.
- #93KaiKYSeveral origins
The sea, salt water. Hawaiian is one of several languages that own this name — it is also Japanese, Chinese, Welsh and Danish — and the pile-up is part of why it climbed.
- Keanukeh-AH-nooHawaiian
The cool breeze, from ke and anu, coolness. Universally recognised and rarely given; recognition and use are different things for this one.
- KoaKOH-ahHawaiian
Brave, bold, a warrior — and Acacia koa, the tallest tree in the Hawaiian forest, whose wood was worked into canoe hulls and is still worked into ʻukulele.
- Kekoakeh-KOH-ahHawaiian
The warrior, definite and singular: not a brave boy but the one who holds the role. The most-given of the koa names within Hawaiʻi.
- Ikaikaee-KY-kahHawaiian
Strong, powerful, forceful. Hawaiian applies it to a swell, a trade wind or an argument as readily as to a person, which is what keeps the violence out of it.
- Kaleokah-LEH-ohHawaiian
The voice, the sound. Ka Leo o Hawaiʻi, the voice of Hawaiʻi, has been the university's student paper since 1922.
Traditional names built on the article
Hawaiian has one singular word for “the” and it takes two shapes: ka is the default, and ke replaces it before a word beginning with k, e, a or o — a rule students remember as KEAO. The plural is nā, for every noun without exception. So ke ahi, the fire, is Keahi; ka lani, the heavens, is Kalani; nā koa, the warriors, is Nākoa. Keanu works the rule through in full.
- Keahikeh-AH-heeHawaiian
The fire. Watch the ʻokina in the language around it: ahi is fire, ʻahi is the yellowfin tuna, and one mark separates them.
- Kealohakeh-ah-LOH-hahHawaiian
The love. Aloha is affection, compassion and mercy before it is ever a greeting; the cognates are Samoan alofa, Tongan ʻofa and Māori aroha.
- Kekaikeh-KYHawaiian
The sea. Kai is salt water and wai is fresh — and doubling wai gives waiwai, wealth, because fresh water was the wealth.
- Keolakeh-OH-lahHawaiian
The life. Ola runs from being alive through being well to being saved, and hoʻōla, to heal, is the same root with a causative prefix.
- Kanoakah-NOH-ahHawaiian
The free one; the commoner. Noa is release from kapu, restriction — its exact opposite, and the pair structured the whole of old Hawaiian life.
- Kalanikah-LAH-neeHawaiian
The heavens, and by direct extension the royal one. Lani was the vocabulary of rank as much as of the sky.
- KaipoKY-pohHawaiian
The sweetheart. Ipo is the plain everyday word a Hawaiian speaker uses for a loved one, not a poetic flourish; ka, not ke, because ipo begins with i.
- Kainoaky-NOH-ahHawaiian
The name — meaning the namesake, the child who carries a name forward. It points straight at the inoa kupuna, the ancestral name handed down by a grandparent.
- NākoaNAH-koh-ahHawaiian
The warriors, plural. English has no comfortable equivalent: the name does not call a child a warrior, it places him among them.
Word names
Hawaiian keeps far more of its everyday vocabulary in play for naming than English does. These are not compounds and not borrowings, they are the words themselves — heard the way an English speaker hears Hunter or Hope, with the meaning arriving alongside the sound. Hawaiian adjectives carry no gender, so most are given to girls as readily as to boys.
- PonoPOH-nohHawaiian
Goodness, uprightness, correct procedure, balance. It is in the state motto — ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono — and English needs a paragraph for what it does in two syllables.
- Kūponokoo-POH-nohHawaiian
Upright, honest, fair; literally standing where one should, from kū, to stand. Chosen for its sense rather than its fashion, and uncommon even in Hawaiʻi.
- Makoamah-KOH-ahHawaiian
Fearless, brave, and also energetic — a working adjective of the language rather than a compound built for naming.
- NaluNAH-looHawaiian
Wave, surf, swell — the moving water a surfer actually reads, not the sea in general. A second dictionary sense is to ponder.
- MaluMAH-looHawaiian
Shade, shelter, peace, protection. Hawaiian does not treat the physical fact of shade and the social fact of safety as two ideas.
- Makanamah-KAH-nahHawaiian
A gift, a present, and also the act of giving one. The ordinary modern word, with no article welded to the front.
- Noheano-HEH-ahHawaiian
Handsome, lovely, of fine appearance. Three beats, not two — the final ea is two vowels, never “NO-hee-a”.
- HōkūHOH-kooHawaiian
Star. Both vowels take the kahakō and are held long. In the lunar month Hōkū is also the night the moon comes up full.
- Kōnanekoh-NAH-nehHawaiian
Bright moonlight — a night the moon has lit clear. Kōnane is also an old capture game played with lava pebbles and coral.
- Alakaʻiah-lah-KAH-eeHawaiian
Leader, guide, from ala (path) and kaʻi (to lead). The ʻokina is a consonant, so the last two vowels stay apart.
- Kaulanakow-LAH-nahHawaiian
Famous, celebrated, renowned. Kaulana Nā Pua, written in 1893, is among the most widely sung of all Hawaiian songs.
- Kaimanaky-MAH-nahHawaiian
Two honest readings at once: a loan of English “diamond”, and a native compound of kai (sea) and mana (spiritual power). Both are in use.
Hawaiianised forms of foreign names
Hawaiian has eight consonants, five vowels, no consonant clusters and no syllable that ends in anything but a vowel. A foreign name cannot be borrowed into it, only rebuilt. These are the results, and they are a documented part of the tradition with a real chronology rather than a novelty: Kimo appears on Hawaiʻi birth records from the late 1940s, Kāwika and Keoni across the decades after. Scripture went a different route — the missionary translators worked from Greek and produced Ioane for John and Iakobo for James, so the language ended up with a church form and a street form of the same man.
- Kāwikakah-VEE-kahHawaiian
David, rebuilt. No d, so k; no v, so w — and Hawaiian w is regularly a v after i. The Hebrew sense, beloved, rides across unchanged.
- Keonikeh-OH-neeHawaiian
John. The initial sound resolves to k and the final n is given a vowel to lean on, giving ke-o-ni. Ioane is the Bible's John and stayed in church.
- KimoKEE-mohHawaiian
James — and the shape of the word points to spoken Jim rather than written James, which is how these adaptations were generally made: by ear.
A chiefly name
One name that belongs in any honest list and is not an ordinary pick.
- Kamehamehakah-MEH-hah-MEH-hahHawaiian
The one set apart, the lonely one, from ka and mehameha. He was born Paiʻea and took this name later; between 1782 and 1810 he brought the whole archipelago under one rule. In Hawaiʻi it is a royal name, not one parents choose from a list.
How Hawaiian naming works
Traditionally a Hawaiian family did not choose a name so much as receive one, and Mary Kawena Pukui's work records the categories the tradition distinguished. An inoa pō came in the night, delivered in a dream or a vision, often by an ʻaumakua, a family guardian spirit; refusing one was believed to make the child sicken until it was accepted. An inoa hōʻailona came from a sign — a shape in the clouds, a storm at the hour of birth, a bird that would not leave the door. An inoa ʻūlāleo came as a voice, spoken aloud by nobody visible. An inoa kūamuamu was deliberately coarse, given to a child whose older siblings had died, on the reasoning that nothing would want to take a child named so unappealingly. And an inoa kupuna was an ancestor's name handed down by a grandparent, which is the category Kainoa quietly points at. Underneath all of them is one belief: a name carried mana, it affected the health and fortune of the child who wore it, and a name that proved wrong could be taken back.
The written language is younger than the names. Missionaries fixed Hawaiian on paper in the 1820s with five vowels and eight consonants, and two marks do real work in it. The ʻokina is a consonant, the catch in the throat that keeps Alakaʻi from collapsing into two syllables; the kahakō is the macron that holds a vowel long, as in Hōkū and Kūpono. American databases strip both, so a boy registered Kawika is usually a Kāwika on his family's terms. The language itself came close to going under: an 1896 law made English the medium of instruction in Hawaiʻi's schools, and Hawaiian naming thinned through the century that followed. It came back with the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s, and the immersion schools that opened in the 1980s are the reason the names on this page are given by families who know exactly what the words mean.