Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for September 14, 2026
Archive · September 14, 2026
MĀKAUKAU
say it: mah-KOW-kow
Ready, prepared — and in the same breath able, capable, skilled, qualified. One word for both.
What it means
Pukui and Elbert take a long run at mākaukau before they get anywhere near a clock. Able, competent, capable, handy, efficient, proficient, versed, adept, skilled, expert, qualified — eleven English words. Only after all of those do they arrive at prepared, ready. The entry then turns the word into a noun, too: competence, proficiency, efficiency, aptitude, preparation. It closes with four plain words: to know how, to know well.
English keeps those two ideas in separate rooms. Readiness belongs to this moment — bags packed, shoes by the door. Competence belongs to all the moments before it, the long accumulation of knowing how. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi puts them in one word, and the order of the definitions tells you which one it thinks does the work.
Then comes the causative. Hoʻomākaukau — to prepare, to make ready. That is the same hoʻo- that built hoʻomaha out of maha yesterday: a state turned into something a person has to go and do.
How to use it
Mākaukau is a stative — it describes how somebody or something is, and usually stands where English would insist on an “is ready”. The forms worth carrying around sit on either side of it: the negation, and the causative.
Mākaukau ʻole
“Unprepared, unskilled, unqualified, not ready” — Pukui-Elbert’s own gloss for the negative. ʻOle is the all-purpose not, hung on the end. Notice that one negation covers all four English words at once, because in Hawaiian they were never four separate things to begin with.
hoʻomākaukau
“To prepare, make ready,” per Pukui-Elbert. The older dictionaries put it at more length — to make ready; to prepare; to get in readiness for business or for a coming event. Mākaukau is the condition. Hoʻomākaukau is somebody causing it. It is also, this time of year, the verb on every hurricane-season flyer in the islands.
Hoʻomākaukau ʻia ma kēia kānāwai.
“Provided for by this law.” Pukui-Elbert’s example sentence, and proof the word runs well past packing a bag. In the passive, hoʻomākaukau ʻia is what a statute does for the people underneath it: makes them ready, provides for them.
Why this word matters
Yesterday was hoʻomaha — rest, on the one day the calendar itself names for stopping. Today is Pōʻakahi, night number one, the first day of the week. The two words line up better than the calendar deserves, because one is the price of the other.
You are not ready because the clock says so. You are ready because you know how.
Read the entry again in order. Able, competent, capable, handy, efficient, proficient, versed, adept, skilled, expert, qualified — and only then, prepared, ready. Whatever readiness is in this language, it is assembled out of knowing how, not out of arriving on time. Pukui and Elbert even point the reader sideways to ʻākau, right, the right hand, and the English they chose keeps the hand in the picture: handy sits in that list beside expert.
Which is why the causative carries the weight. Somebody has to hoʻomākaukau. Readiness does not turn up on its own on a Monday morning — it is the paddling practice in July that decides the race in October, the lines run a hundred times before the hoʻike, the go-bag packed in May that matters in September.
In a hālau, in a classroom, on a canoe beach, you will mostly hear the word as a single question. Mākaukau? Nobody is asking whether your shoes are on. Read the long way through the dictionary entry, the question is: do you know how. And the answer people give is one word back.
There is one more line in the entry, easy to miss. Capitalized, Mākaukau is a star name — and Pukui and Elbert record it with no data at all. Somebody once looked up, named a star Ready, and which star it was has since been lost. The language kept the word anyway. That is its own quiet argument for preparation: you do not always get to know what it was for.
Sources
The definitions of mākaukau — able, competent, capable, handy, efficient, proficient, versed, adept, skilled, expert, qualified; prepared, ready; competence, proficiency, efficiency, aptitude, preparation; to know how, to know well — together with mākaukau ʻole (unprepared, unskilled, unqualified, not ready), the causative hoʻomākaukau (to prepare, make ready), the example sentence Hoʻomākaukau ʻia ma kēia kānāwai (provided for by this law), the cross-reference to ʻākau (right), and Mākaukau as a star name recorded with no further data, are all from the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert, 1986). The longer gloss of hoʻomākaukau — to make ready; to prepare; to get in readiness for business or for a coming event — is from the older dictionaries (Andrews, 1865; Andrews-Parker, 1922) as carried in the Combined Hawaiian Dictionary (2020). Pōʻakahi, Monday, and ʻae, yes, are Pukui-Elbert (1986). The one-word question — Mākaukau? — is everyday contemporary usage rather than a dictionary citation, and is described here as such. All entries consulted via Wehewehe Wikiwiki (wehe.hilo.hawaii.edu) and wehewehe.org.