Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for September 7, 2026
Archive · September 7, 2026
LIMAHANA
say it: lee-mah-HAH-nah
Labor, laborer, worker, employee — and, said of a person, industrious, busy.
What it means
Limahana is given by Pukui and Elbert as: labor, laborer, worker, employee; industrious, busy. It is both the job and the person doing it, and it is also an adjective you can hang on somebody who does not sit still.
Take it apart and the picture is plain. Lima is the hand or the arm. Hana is work — to work, to make, to do, and the labor itself. Put them together and you get the hand at work. Not the title, not the paycheck, not the org chart. The hand.
That construction is worth sitting with, because it decides who counts. A limahana is anyone whose hands are in the job: the one on the taro patch, the one on the loading dock, the one at the register at 5am, the one in the office. The word does not rank them.
How to use it
Limahana is a noun first — the worker, the workforce — and it turns up inside the formal Hawaiian names the State of Hawaiʻi uses for its own labor institutions. It also works as a description of a person.
papa limahana
Labor board. Given directly in Pukui-Elbert under the limahana entry. Papa is the board or the class; limahana tells you whose board it is.
Ka ʻOihana Pono Limahana
The Department of Labor and Industrial Relations — the official Hawaiian name the State of Hawaiʻi carries alongside the English one. ʻOihana is the department or trade, pono here the rightness or welfare, limahana the workers. Read plainly: the department for the wellbeing of workers.
hana lima
Work done with the hands — manual work, handiwork. Same two roots as limahana, flipped. Useful for hearing how the compound is built: lima and hana keep finding each other.
Why this word matters
Today is Labor Day. The last word on this page was pau — finished, done, and the pau hana that ends the workday. Limahana is the other half of that. Before there is a pau hana there is a limahana.
Hawaiʻi has a particular relationship with this word. The plantation century filled these islands with people whose entire standing was that they were labor — Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Okinawan, Korean, Filipino, brought in wave after wave and housed by camp. The 1946 sugar strike and the 1949 dock strike were fought by people who had been counted as hands and decided to be counted as people. Much of what daily life in the islands looks like now — who owns a house, who speaks what at home, whose grandmother taught whom to cook — runs back through that.
Lima plus hana. The hand at work. The word never once mentions what you are paid.
So the compound reads differently here than a word like “employee” does. An employee is defined by who employs them. A limahana is defined by their own hands. That is not a small difference in a place where the ownership of nearly everything has changed hands more than once.
And it stays generous. Someone can be limahana without a job title at all — industrious, busy, hands moving. Which describes most of the people who hold this place together on a Monday off.
Sources
The definitions of limahana — labor, laborer, worker, employee; industrious, busy — and the phrase papa limahana (labor board) are from the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert, 1986), consulted via wehewehe.org and the UH Hilo Wehe²wiki² Hawaiian language dictionaries. The root entries for lima (hand, arm) and hana (work, to work, labor), and hana lima (work with the hands), come from the same source. Ka ʻOihana Pono Limahana is the Hawaiian name used by the State of Hawaiʻi Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. Nothing on this page is invented; where a phrase could not be verified in a dictionary or an official source, it was left out.