Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 18, 2026
Archive · June 18, 2026
LĀ
say it: LAH
Sun — and also day, date. One small word for the light overhead and the span of hours it measures.
What it means
In the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary, lā is the sun — the sun’s heat, and anything sunny or solar. It is the light overhead, the warmth on your back, the thing the whole sky turns around.
The same word is also day and date. That is no accident: a day in Hawaiʻi is one turn of the sun, from when it lifts over the horizon to when it sinks back into the sea. To name the sun and to name the day, you reach for the same two letters.
Because a day is one turn of the sun, lā became the building block of the calendar. Kēia lā is “today” — “this sun.” And the week is built on it: Lāpule, Sunday, is literally “prayer day,” the lā set aside for pule.
How to use it
Lā runs through everyday Hawaiian — the calendar, greetings, and the daily journey of the sun across the sky:
Why this word matters
In two days the sun reaches its highest point of the year. June 20 is the summer solstice — the longest lā of 2026, when the light lingers latest over the islands before the days slowly begin to shorten again. There is no better week to sit with the word for the sun.
Mai ka lā hiki a ka lā kau.
“From the rising of the sun to the setting of the sun.” Pukui records it among the ʻōlelo noʻeau — the span of a single day, sunrise to sunset, and by extension the whole sweep of the islands from end to end, east to west. One word, lā, measures both the day and the distance.
That is the quiet power of this word. The same sun that names the hours also names the years: a birthday is a lā hānau, a “day of birth,” and a long life is many thousands of lā strung together, each one rising and setting in its turn.
Digital Piko opens every morning with a new word for exactly this reason — one lā at a time. Learn a word with the sunrise, carry it through the day, and by the time the sun sets you know a little more Hawaiʻi than you did when it rose.
Sources
Definition of lā (“sun, sun heat; sunny, solar” and “day, date”) and the compounds kēia lā (“today”), Lāpule (“Sunday”), lā hānau (“birthday”), ka pukana lā (“sunrise”), and napoʻo ʻana o ka lā (“sunset”) from Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary (1986), via wehewehe.org. The ʻōlelo noʻeau “Mai ka lā hiki a ka lā kau” (“from the rising of the sun to the setting of the sun; from sunrise to sunset, and from end to end of the islands”) is recorded by Mary Kawena Pukui, ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings (Bishop Museum Press, 1983), #2062. The 2026 summer solstice falls on June 20. Diacritics (ʻokina, kahakō) shown as in the sources.