Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for May 24, 2026
Archive · May 24, 2026
ʻOHANA
say it: oh-HAH-nah
Family · Kin · Belonging · Branching — the people who grow from the same root
What it means
The Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary defines ʻohana as family, relative, kin group; related. As a verb, it carries a second sense: to gather for family prayers — a shortening of pule ʻohana, family prayer. One word that names the people you belong to and the act of coming together as those people.
What makes ʻohana different from the English word family is the shape it draws. English family tends to draw a nuclear unit — parents, kids, maybe a couple of grandparents — with everyone else tagged as “extended.” ʻOhana draws a wider circle from the start. Blood relatives, hānai relatives (informally adopted), in-laws, the aunties and uncles who are not technically your aunties and uncles. The circle is the default; the nuclear unit is a piece inside it, not the boundary.
The dictionary also points at the agricultural root. ʻOhana traces to ʻohā — the shoots that come up from the corm of the kalo (taro) plant. New growth from a shared root. That image, sitting underneath the word, does a lot of the work.
How to use it
These constructions are all documented in the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary:
Why this word matters
ʻOhana traveled the world on a Disney movie. “ʻOhana means family, family means nobody gets left behind.” That line has done a lot of good — it sent the word into living rooms in Ohio and Osaka, and it pointed at something true about the Hawaiian sense of kin. But it also flattened the word into a slogan. The work of paying ʻohana real attention is to put back the parts the slogan dropped.
Start with the kalo (taro). Pukui-Elbert traces ʻohana to ʻohā — the shoots that grow from the corm of the kalo plant. When you cultivate kalo, you separate those shoots and replant them. New growth from a shared root. That is the picture sitting under the word. A family is not a building or a household or a last name. It is a cluster of shoots branching off one root, replanted, taking hold in new soil, still connected by what they came from.
An ʻohana is what grows around a shared root.
That image matters because it changes who gets counted. In a corm-and-shoots family, you do not stop at the people who happen to share a household with you. You count the cousins. You count the hānai uncle who fed you on weekends. You count the aunties who claimed you. The boundary is not blood or paperwork — it is whether you came up from the same root, or were replanted close enough to take hold there.
And then there is the verb sense. ʻOhana, the dictionary says, can mean to gather for family prayers. It is short for pule ʻohana. There is a Sunday-morning quietness in that — the household stopping its scatter, sitting down together, naming itself out loud. The word for the people contains the word for the act of being those people on purpose.
So when someone in Hawaiʻi calls you ʻohana, they are not just being friendly. They are saying you came up from a root near theirs, or that they have decided to replant you close. Either way, you are counted.
Sources
Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary, revised and enlarged edition (University of Hawaiʻi Press). The Pukui-Elbert entry for ʻohana — family, relative, kin group; related; (verb) to gather for family prayers, short for pule ʻohana — and the entries for ʻohā (taro corm offshoot/shoot), ʻohana nui (extended family), pule (prayer), hānai (foster, adopted; to feed, raise), and nui (great, large) are accessible via wehewehe.org. Additional Hawaiian-language reference materials at ulukau.org.