Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 3, 2026
Archive · June 3, 2026
HOʻOMAU
say it: ho-oh-MOW
To continue · To perpetuate · To persevere — to carry something on so it lasts
What it means
Hoʻomau is built from two pieces. At its core is mau — constant, steady, lasting, unceasing, perpetual; the quality of a thing that does not stop. In front of it sits the causative hoʻo-, which turns a state into an action: to make, to cause. Put them together and hoʻomau means to make something last — to continue it, keep it on, perpetuate it.
Pukui & Elbert give it as “to continue, keep on, persist, renew, perpetuate, persevere, last.” So the word holds both the gentle sense — to keep going, to carry on — and the stubborn one — to persist, to refuse to let something end. It is the difference between a thing that merely survives and a thing that someone chooses to carry forward.
You will hear hoʻomau applied to small everyday matters — renewing a license, continuing a subscription — and to the largest ones: keeping a family practice, a song, or a whole language alive across generations.
How to use it
A few documented ways it shows up:
Why this word matters
Yesterday’s word was ola — life, health, the thing that flows down the line from our roots. Hoʻomau is what keeps that line unbroken. Ola is the gift; hoʻomau is the choosing, every day, that it will go on.
To hoʻomau is to decide that something will not end with you.
There is no word that fits a daily Hawaiian lesson better than this one. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi was once pushed to the edge of disappearing — banned from the schools, spoken by fewer and fewer. It is alive today for one reason: people refused to let it stop. They taught it to their keiki, sang it, wrote it, said it out loud when it would have been easier to let it go. That refusal has a name, and the name is hoʻomau.
One Hawaiian-language student put it plainly: this “righteous native language has been subject to forceful eradication,” and so the work is to “make sure that ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi can continue to persevere and carry on for the next generation.” That is hoʻomau in a sentence — not nostalgia, but active, ongoing work.
You don’t need to be fluent to take part. Learning one word a morning is itself a small act of hoʻomau — a tiny perpetuating, a refusal to let the words slip away. E hoʻomau.
Sources
Definition of hoʻomau (“to continue, keep on, persist, renew, perpetuate, persevere, last”) and its root mau (“constant, steady, lasting, perpetual; to continue, endure, last”), along with the example phrases “Hoʻomau aku lā lāua i ka hele” (“the two of them continued on”) and “E hoʻomau hou ʻia i ka laikini” (“renew the license”), verified against Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary (Revised & Enlarged Edition, University of Hawaiʻi Press) via wehewehe.org. The sense of hoʻomau as carrying ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi forward, and the student reflection quoted, are from the University of Hawaiʻi System News, “Hawaiian Word of the Week: Hoʻomau” (hawaii.edu).