Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for September 1, 2026
Archive · September 1, 2026
HOʻOLAULEʻA
say it: ho-oh-lau-LEH-ah
Celebration, festival, a gathering for a large party — and, in the same entry, to reconcile and restore peace.
What it means
Hoʻolauleʻa is given by Pukui and Elbert as celebration, festival, gathering for a celebration, large party — and then the entry keeps going. The same headword also carries: satisfaction; to hold a celebration, to celebrate; to reconcile, restore peace or friendship, appease; to preserve friendship and good will; to be at peace with; to seek to please.
That is one dictionary entry, not two. The word for a block party and the word for patching things up with somebody are the same word, and Hawaiian does not treat that as a coincidence worth explaining.
The build is transparent. The root is lauleʻa — peace, happiness, friendship, and specifically the restoration of a disrupted friendship; happy, glad, genial, courteous, peaceful. In front of it sits hoʻo-, the causative prefix that turns a state into something you do to bring it about. So the literal shape of the word is to cause lauleʻa: to make the peace happen, to make the gladness happen. A party is simply what that looks like when it works.
How to use it
Hoʻolauleʻa works as a noun (the event) and as a verb (the act of celebrating). Both are in the dictionary; you will hear the noun far more often.
he hoʻolauleʻa
A celebration; a festival. The plain noun use — the sense Pukui-Elbert leads with, and the one printed on flyers from Hilo to Hanalei. If somebody says there is a hoʻolauleʻa this weekend, they mean food, music, and the whole town turning out.
e hoʻolauleʻa kākou
Let us celebrate. The verb, in the inclusive kākou — all of us, you included. The University of Hawaiʻi’s Hawaiian Word of the Week feature uses this construction of the word, closing the academic year with me ka hoʻolauleʻa ana i kā lākou kū i ka niʻo, “celebrating their reaching the summit.”
hoʻolauleʻa — to reconcile
The second half of the same dictionary entry: to reconcile, restore peace or friendship, appease, preserve friendship and good will, be at peace with. Not a separate word and not a stretch — Pukui-Elbert lists it under the identical headword.
lauleʻa
The root, standing on its own: peace, happiness, friendship; the restoration of a friendship that had broken; happy, glad, genial, peaceful. Strip the hoʻo- off a party and this is what is underneath it.
Why this word matters
Yesterday’s word was puʻuhonua, the place of refuge — what a community builds for the person who has broken its rules. Hoʻolauleʻa is what happens after. Not the pardon. The party thrown to prove the pardon took.
English keeps these apart. A festival is recreation; a reconciliation is a private, slightly grim piece of work done in a small room. Hawaiian files them under one headword, and the causative prefix explains why. Hoʻo- means you are not waiting for lauleʻa to arrive on its own. You are staging the conditions and trusting the feeling to follow.
Peace is not the mood you throw the party in. It is the thing the party is for.
Anyone who has cooked for a family that was not speaking knows the mechanism. Nobody announces that the argument is over. Somebody sets a date, somebody else brings the rice, and by the second plate the room has decided something without ever discussing it. The gathering does the work that the conversation could not.
Today is the first of September, which in Hawaiʻi is the opening of Aloha Festivals — running since 1946, eighty years this year, and the longest-running cultural festival in the islands. It is a month built almost entirely out of this word. The Royal Court is invested on the 5th. On the 19th, Kalākaua Avenue closes for the 72nd Waikīkī Hoʻolauleʻa, the largest block party in the state. The parade comes on the 26th.
Worth noticing what that festival was for. It started the year after the war ended, in a place that had spent four years under martial law, and the point was to gather people back together in public. Eighty years on, the name still says out loud what it is doing: causing the peace, on purpose, by feeding everybody at once.
Sources
The definitions of hoʻolauleʻa and of the root lauleʻa — including the reconciliation and “restore peace or friendship” senses carried under the same headword — are from the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert, 1986), consulted via wehewehe.org and the UH Hilo Wehewehe Wikiwiki entry for lauleʻa. The e hoʻolauleʻa kākou construction and the closing-of-the-year sentence are from the University of Hawaiʻi Hawaiian Word of the Week. Aloha Festivals dates, the 72nd Waikīkī Hoʻolauleʻa, and the 1946 founding are from alohafestivals.com. The hoʻo- causative reading is standard Hawaiian grammar, not a folk etymology.