Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 27, 2026
Archive · June 27, 2026
MOʻOLELO
say it: mo-oh-LEH-loh
A story, history, or tradition — and the telling of it. Literally a “succession of talk,” the line of words handed mouth to mouth that carries a people’s memory forward.
What it means
Moʻolelo is a story, tale, myth, history, tradition, literature, legend — even a journal, a log, or the written record of a meeting. One word stretches from a bedtime tale to the recorded history of a whole people, because in the Hawaiian way they were never separate things. A story was the history; the history was kept by being told.
The word is built from two smaller ones: moʻo, a succession, series, or unbroken line, and ʻōlelo, language or talk. A moʻolelo is literally a “succession of talk” — words set one after another and passed down the line, because for centuries every story lived in the mouth and the memory, not on the page.
How to use it
A few attested ways the word lives, from everyday speech to the names of whole traditions:
haʻi moʻolelo
To tell stories; storytelling. Haʻi is to tell or narrate — so haʻi moʻolelo is the living act of passing a story on out loud.
Why this word matters
Before there were books here, there was moʻolelo. A people who wrote nothing down for centuries still carried their genealogies, their gods, their place names, their navigation, and their law — all of it held in story and handed along the moʻo, the unbroken line, from one mouth to the next. To lose the telling was to lose the knowing. So the telling was sacred work.
That is the quiet weight inside the word. A moʻolelo is not just entertainment; it is how a place remembers itself. The name of a bay, the shape of a rain, the deed of an ancestor — each one rides inside a story, and the story keeps it alive.
A moʻolelo is a people’s memory, kept by being told.
This is also why we built the rest of this site the way we did. Every product, every photograph, every word here is trying to carry a moʻolelo — the story of one piece of land in Pāhoa and the people rooted to it. We would rather hand you a true story than a clever one.
So when you learn this word and tell it to someone today, you are doing the oldest work there is: adding one more link to the moʻo, keeping a line of talk unbroken a little longer.
Sources
Definition of moʻolelo (story, tale, myth, history, tradition, literature, legend, journal, log, chronicle, record) and its derivation from moʻo (succession, series, line) plus ʻōlelo (language, talk) — “succession of talk” — confirmed in the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary via wehewehe.org. The phrase haʻi moʻolelo (to tell stories) is drawn from the same dictionary; kahiko (old, ancient) and the moʻolelo/kaʻao distinction (narrative history vs. fanciful legend) are likewise documented in the Pukui-Elbert entries and by the Bishop Museum’s nūpepa archive.