Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for September 15, 2026
Archive · September 15, 2026
KŪLIA
say it: KOO-lee-ah
To try, to strive — and, three lines down in the same entry, outstanding, fortunate, lucky.
What it means
Pukui and Elbert give kūlia three senses, and the order they put them in is the whole lesson. First it is the passive-imperative of kū — to stand, to halt. Then it is a transitive verb: to try, to strive. Then it is a stative: outstanding, fortunate, lucky.
Start at the root. Kū is to stand, and kūlia in that first sense is standing put in front of something — kūlia i ke ākea, place before the public. The striving sense grows straight out of that posture. To strive, in this word, is not to scramble. It is to plant yourself facing the thing and stay standing.
The third sense is the one that catches people. The same four letters that mean keep straining toward it also mean outstanding, fortunate, lucky. Hawaiian did not file the effort and the result in separate drawers. A lā kūlia is a lucky day. Kūlia i ka uʻi is outstanding beauty. The reaching and the height reached wear one word.
How to use it
Kūlia almost always arrives pointed at something. The dictionary examples are all built the same way — the verb, then a preposition, then the thing you are standing toward.
Kūlia i ka nuʻu
“Strive to reach the summit.” Pukui-Elbert record this as Queen Kapiʻolani’s motto. Nuʻu is the height, the topmost place. The line has outlived the queen by more than a century and is still read out at graduations and hung over gym doors across the islands.
Kūlia i kō ikaika
“Exert your strength.” Literally, stand toward your own strength — not toward a rival, not toward a score. The measure in this sentence is the strength you already have.
Kūlia e loaʻa kā naʻauao
“Strive to obtain wisdom.” Same shape, aimed at naʻauao — enlightenment, learning. Worth setting beside the first one: the summit is not the only thing the word will point at.
Lā kūlia
“Lucky day” — the third sense working as a plain adjective. And note hoʻokūlia, the causative Pukui-Elbert list alongside the entry: to cause the striving in somebody else. That one is a coach’s word, and a teacher’s.
Why this word matters
Yesterday was mākaukau — ready, and able, and skilled, all in one breath. Today is kūlia, and the two are the same argument told from opposite ends. Mākaukau is the state you are in. Kūlia is what put you there.
The word does not separate the reaching from the height. It never did.
It is September. The school year is a few weeks old, the fall season is underway in every league on every island, and kūlia i ka nuʻu is printed on more banners in this state than any other sentence in the language. Words that get printed that often usually go soft. This one has a defence against it, built into the dictionary entry: the root is kū, to stand. Strive, in Hawaiian, is a standing verb before it is a running one.
That matters because the English word carries a whine in it. To strive is to fall short and keep going. Kūlia carries no such thing. You plant yourself facing the summit, and the same word that describes the facing describes the summit — outstanding, fortunate, lucky. The distance between where you stand and where you are headed is not treated as a deficit. It is just the direction you are pointed.
Queen Kapiʻolani chose it for a motto in a century when the reaching was very far from guaranteed. She founded a maternity home for Hawaiian mothers while the Hawaiian population was collapsing. Kūlia i ka nuʻu was not a slogan about winning. It was a posture to hold when the summit was not visible from where she was standing.
Sources
All three senses of kūlia — the passive-imperative of kū (to stand, halt); the transitive to try, strive; and the stative outstanding, fortunate, lucky — together with the example sentences Kūlia i ke ākea (place before the public), Kūlia i ka nuʻu (strive to reach the summit, noted there as Queen Kapiʻolani’s motto), Kūlia i kō ikaika (exert your strength), Kūlia e loaʻa kā naʻauao (strive to obtain wisdom), Kūlia i ka uʻi (outstanding beauty) and lā kūlia (lucky day), and the causative hoʻokūlia, are from the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert, 1986). The pairing of luck and striving under one head — “one’s lot; luck: to strive” — is also recorded in Judd, Pukui & Stokes (1943), and the entry is carried in Kent (1986). Note that kūliʻa, to desire greatly, is a separate headword and not a variant spelling of this word. Pōʻalua, Tuesday, and nuʻu, height or summit, are Pukui-Elbert (1986). All entries consulted via Wehewehe Wikiwiki (wehe.hilo.hawaii.edu) and wehewehe.org.