Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 30, 2026
Archive · June 30, 2026
ʻŌLELO
say it: OH-leh-loh
Language, speech, word — and the living act of speaking. The very thing that carries a people forward, one sentence at a time.
What it means
ʻŌlelo is the Hawaiian word for language, speech, and the spoken word — and, used as a verb, simply “to speak.” The Pukui-Elbert dictionary gives it as language, speech, word, quotation, statement, command; to speak, say, talk. It is the plain, everyday word for talking, and at the same time the name a people give to their own tongue.
When Hawaiians speak of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, they mean the Hawaiian language itself — not an abstraction but a living inheritance, the sound of the islands spoken aloud. The word holds both the small act, one person saying one thing, and the vast thing that act belongs to: a whole way of seeing the world, carried in the mouth.
How to use it
A few documented forms show how the word stretches from a single sentence to an entire language:
ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi
The Hawaiian language. Literally “Hawaiian speech” — the everyday name for the mother tongue of these islands.
ʻōlelo noʻeau
A wise or proverbial saying. Noʻeau means skillful, clever, wise — so an ʻōlelo noʻeau is “skillful speech,” the poetic proverbs Mary Kawena Pukui gathered by the thousands.
ʻōlelo makuahine
Mother tongue — literally “mother speech.” The first language one is raised in, the words that come before all others.
Why this word matters
For a stretch of the twentieth century, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi was pushed to the edge of silence. After an 1896 law made English the medium of instruction in schools, the number of fluent speakers fell, generation by generation, to a dangerously low point. A language that had carried genealogies, chant, and the name of every wind and rain was nearly lost.
It did not die. Beginning in the 1980s, families and teachers built immersion preschools — pūnana leo, “language nests” — and a new generation grew up speaking it again. Today ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi is an official language of the state, alongside English, and is spoken by children once more. That return is one of the quiet triumphs of these islands.
I ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make — in speech there is life, in speech there is death.
That old ʻōlelo noʻeau says words can heal or wound, give life or take it. Read another way, it speaks of the language itself: a people live through their ʻōlelo, and without it something of them would be gone. To speak it — even one word a day — is to keep it alive.
That is the whole reason this small page exists. Every word learned and said aloud is a thread pulled back into the weave. The language belongs to anyone willing to carry it with respect.
Sources
The definition of ʻōlelo (language, speech, word, quotation; to speak, say, talk) is confirmed in the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary via wehewehe.org (Nā Puke Wehewehe ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi). ʻŌlelo noʻeau (proverbial saying) is documented in Mary Kawena Pukui’s ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings (Bishop Museum Press), the source of the saying I ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make. ʻŌlelo makuahine (mother tongue) is attested in the same dictionaries. The account of the language’s suppression after the 1896 schools law and its revival through the Pūnana Leo immersion movement reflects the documented public history of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.