Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for August 1, 2026
Archive · August 1, 2026
PŌHAKU
say it: poh-HAH-koo
Rock, stone, mineral — and, in the dictionary’s own list, a fishing sinker and thunder. On the youngest island in the chain, it is the word for what the ground is still making.
What it means
The Pukui–Elbert entry for pōhaku is short and wider than you expect: “rock, stone, mineral, tablet; sinker; thunder; rocky, stony.” The boulder in the pasture is pōhaku. So is the stone tablet someone writes on, and the weight that carries a fishing line down.
Thunder sits in that same list. The dictionary records it without explaining it, and a careful student should leave it there rather than invent a story about why. It is enough to notice that the word covers both the heaviest thing on the ground and a sound that comes out of the sky.
There is a causative form too — hoʻopōhaku, to harden, as lava; to petrify. Figuratively, the dictionary adds, stubborn. On this island that first sense is not a metaphor. It is a thing you can stand and watch happen.
How to use it
These are attested in the dictionaries and in the collections:
pōhaku kuʻi ʻai — literally the food-pounding stone: the poi pounder. It works against a papa kuʻi ʻai, the pounding board, to turn steamed kalo into poi. Kalo was this page’s word on July 2.
ʻalā — the dense, water-worn basalt a pounder is carved from, gathered out of streambeds and shorelines where the water has already done the smoothing. Not every stone will do the work; this one will.
hoʻopōhaku — to harden, as lava; to petrify. And, figuratively, stubborn. Pukui–Elbert lists both senses under the one word.
Pōhaku o Hauola — a named stone standing in the sea at Lahaina, Maui, where women went to sit for an easier birth, and where the piko of babies were hidden away in the crevices afterward.
Why this word matters
Hawaiʻi Island is the youngest land in the chain, and it is not finished. Kīlauea has spent much of the last century adding to it, and in 2018 the lower Puna flows put down new ground a short drive from where this brand keeps its roots. Most places inherit their stone. Here you can meet pōhaku that is younger than you are.
That is part of why pōhaku is not treated as inert. The Bishop Museum puts it plainly: in traditional Hawaiian thought, stones are living things carrying mana, not scenery. Particular ones are known by name and remembered for what they do — like Pōhaku o Hauola at Lahaina, where mothers sat, and where the piko was tucked into the rock and left there.
A stone that holds a piko. That is about as close as a word can get to what this whole page is for.
Piko was the first word this page ever ran, back on May 17 — the navel, the cord, the place you are attached from. To hide a piko in pōhaku is to say: this child belongs to this place, and the place will keep the proof long after everyone who remembers is gone. Stone outlasts the memory. That is the job it was given.
Which is worth carrying into an ordinary Saturday. The rock wall along the road was stacked by somebody. The stone holding down the tarp came from somewhere. If you move one, the old instinct is to put it back where it was — not out of superstition, but because it was already doing something before you got there.
Sources
Definitions verified against the Pukui–Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary (1986) via wehewehe.org — pōhaku: “rock, stone, mineral, tablet; sinker; thunder; rocky, stony”; hoʻopōhaku: “to harden, as lava; to petrify; hard,” figuratively stubborn. Pōhaku kuʻi ʻai and papa kuʻi ʻai, and ʻalā as the water-worn basalt pounders are carved from, are documented by the Bishop Museum and by Smarthistory’s entry on the pōhaku kuʻi ʻai. The standing of pōhaku as living things carrying mana is drawn from the Bishop Museum’s online learning materials. Pōhaku o Hauola and the practice of hiding the piko in it come from Kamehameha Schools’ Kaʻiwakīloumoku Hawaiian Cultural Center, drawing on Mary Kawena Pukui’s ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings (Bishop Museum Press). Eruption history from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.