Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 22, 2026
Archive · June 22, 2026
WAHINE
say it: wah-HEE-neh
Woman, lady, wife — and the word inside makuahine, “mother.” The counterpart to yesterday’s kāne.
What it means
Wahine is the everyday Hawaiian word for a woman or a lady, and the word a man uses for his wife — kaʻu wahine, “my wife.” The same word that means woman names the woman you marry.
Like yesterday’s kāne, it is a building block. On its own wahine means woman; joined to another word it marks the female in a pair: makuahine is the female parent — mother; kaikuahine is a man’s sister; kūkū wahine a grandmother.
It carries one of Hawaiian’s quiet grammar lessons, too. One woman is wahine; lengthen that first vowel and you have wāhine — women. Ka wahine, the woman; nā wāhine, the women. A single kahakō does the work of an English “-s.”
How to use it
Wahine runs through the names Hawaiian families call each other by — the female side of yesterday’s kāne:
Why this word matters
Digital Piko is built on ʻohana — family — and where kāne carries the men of a family, wahine carries the women. It is the thread from kūkū wahine to makuahine to kaikuahine: grandmother, mother, sister, named by the same small word.
Yesterday was for the kāne; today the word turns and faces the other way. A makuahine stands in the same line a makua kāne does — the two words are the reason a family has both a mother and a father to name at all.
One word for woman, wife, and mother — wahine holds them in a single breath.
The word reaches higher than the everyday, too. In some chants — among them the ones for Pele — wahine carries the sense of a goddess, a woman of great mana. We name that only with respect; but it is worth knowing that the plain word for woman has, in the right mouth, always been able to mean far more.
So if you have a wahine in your life — a makuahine, a kaikuahine, a kūkū wahine — this is her word. Say it well.
Sources
Definition of wahine (“woman, lady, wife; female, feminine”; in chants, a connotation of goddess) from Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary (1986), via wehewehe.org. The compounds makuahine (mother, female parent) and kaikuahine (sister or female cousin of a man) are entries in wehewehe.org / Pukui-Elbert. The plural wāhine — formed by lengthening the third-from-last vowel, e.g. nā wāhine, “the women” — is documented in standard reference grammars of Hawaiian. Diacritics (ʻokina, kahakō) shown as in the sources.