Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for August 10, 2026
Archive · August 10, 2026
NANI
say it: NAH-nee
Beauty, glory, splendor — beautiful, glorious, splendid. Also the word that turns a sentence into an exclamation: how fine! how beautiful!
What it means
Nani is the Hawaiian word for beauty — but Pukui-Elbert gives it more weight than the English word usually carries: “beauty, glory, splendor; beautiful, pretty, glorious, splendid.” It is the word for a flower and the word for glory in the same breath. Something nani doesn’t just look good; it shines.
The word also does quiet grammatical work. As an intensifier it turns a plain statement into an exclamation: Nani ka maikaʻi! — how fine! And there is an attested idiom, He nani nō ia — “it’s a good thing” — where nani means not beauty but simple rightness. The dictionaries even record it as a conjunction meaning “since, because.” One small word, working hard.
Add the causative prefix and you get hoʻonani — to beautify, adorn, glorify, honor. To make beautiful, or to declare that something already is.
How to use it
These are attested in the dictionaries:
Nani ka maikaʻi! — “How fine!” The intensifier at work: nani + any quality = an exclamation of wonder.
He nani nō ia — “It’s a good thing.” An attested idiom where nani quietly means good, right, fortunate.
Nani ʻino kuʻu makemake — “How very great is my desire.” Two intensifiers stacked — nani and ʻino — for wanting something with your whole chest.
Hoʻonani i ka Makua mau — “Give praise to the eternal Father.” The opening line of the Hawaiian Doxology, translated by Hiram Bingham and still sung across the islands two centuries later — hoʻonani as glorify.
Why this word matters
If you read yesterday’s word, you have already met today’s. The chant line preserved in Fornander — Nani ka ʻōiwi o Hilo i ka lehua, “Hilo appears beautiful with lehua” — opens with it. Nani is how Hawaiian starts a sentence when the speaker has seen something worth stopping for.
That is the thing about this word: it is almost always pointed outward. Nani shows up praising a place, a person, a flower, a morning — beauty as something you notice out loud, not something you keep to yourself.
Beauty, in this language, is a thing you say — not just a thing you see.
And when Hawaiʻi needed a word big enough for glory itself, it reached for the same one. Hoʻonani i ka Makua mau has opened and closed gatherings in these islands for two hundred years — the humble word for a pretty flower, scaled up to praise everything there is.
So today, try it the way the language uses it: out loud. The light on the water, the rain coming down the hill, somebody’s garden on your street. Nani. Say what you see.
Sources
Definitions verified against the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary (1986) via wehewehe.org / Wehewehe Wikiwiki — headword nani: “Beauty, glory, splendor; beautiful, pretty, glorious, splendid,” with the attested examples Nani ka maikaʻi (how fine), He nani nō ia (it’s a good thing, idiom), and Nani ʻino kuʻu makemake (how very great is my desire), plus the conjunction sense “since, because.” Hoʻonani (to beautify, adorn, glorify, honor) verified in the same dictionary; the Hawaiian Doxology Hoʻonani i ka Makua mau, written by Hiram Bingham, documented at huapala.org and hymnary.org.