Word of the Day · Archive
The Hawaiian word for June 23, 2026
Archive · June 23, 2026
PUA
say it: POO-ah
A flower or blossom — and, in the very same breath, a child, a descendant, the next bud on the family line. After kāne and wahine, the word for what they bring forth.
What it means
Pua is the Hawaiian word for a flower or blossom — the bloom of a plant, the tassel and stem of sugar cane, and the act of blossoming itself. As a verb, pua is the flower opening: a plant in bloom has pua.
But the same word reaches past the garden. Pua also means progeny — a child, a descendant, offspring, the young of a living thing. The young of a fish are pua iʻa; the descendants of chiefs are pua aliʻi. To a Hawaiian ear, a flower and a child are one idea spoken twice: something a living thing puts forth.
That doubling is no accident of sound. A plant flowers in order to seed what comes next; a family flowers in its keiki. Pua holds the blossom and the reason a blossom exists, all in one word.
How to use it
After kāne and wahine, pua is what the line keeps putting forth — in the garden and in the family alike:
Why this word matters
For two mornings this page has held the pair a family begins with — kāne and wahine. Pua is what they pass on.
Hawaiians trace themselves through moʻokūʻauhau, genealogy, and in that telling a child is not a separate person who arrives from nowhere. A child is the bud on a line that runs back through every makua and kupuna who came before. To call someone pua is to say they are the flowering of all of them.
A child is not separate from the family tree. A child is its blossom.
That is why the word sits so easily in names — Pualani, Leilani, a whole garden of them — and why a lei of blossoms can stand for the people you love. The flower and the descendant share one word because, to the eye that sees it, they are the same act: a living thing reaching forward, putting out the next of its kind.
Next time you call a keiki pua, you are not only calling them sweet. You are naming them the bloom of everyone behind them — and the seed of everyone still to come.
Sources
Definitions from Pukui & Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, via wehewehe.org: pua — “flower, blossom, tassel and stem of sugar cane; to bloom, blossom,” and “progeny, child, descendant, offspring; young, spawn, fry.” The compounds pua aliʻi (“descendants of chiefs, royal progeny”) and pua iʻa (“baby fish, fish fry”) appear in the same dictionary, as does the name element in Pualani. Diacritics (ʻokina, kahakō) shown as in the sources.