Word.ws English Dictionary

kaitiaki

kaitiaki noun: the Māori concept of guardianship of the natural environment.

Noun

kaitiaki (countable and uncountable, plural kaitiakis or kaitiaki)

  1. (New Zealand, uncountable) The Māori concept of guardianship of the natural environment.
  2. (New Zealand, countable) In Māori culture, a person serving as a guardian of the natural environment.
    • Kaitiaki are rarely resourced to respond to the many requests for their time and expertise.2019, Jeannette Bastian, Andrew Flinn, Community Archives, Community Spaces: Heritage, Memory and Identity, page 72

Forms of kaitiaki

pluralkaitiakis
pluralkaitiaki

Origin of kaitiaki

Borrowed from Māori kaitiaki.

Questions about kaitiaki

What does kaitiaki mean?
Kaitiaki means the Māori concept of guardianship of the natural environment.
What part of speech is kaitiaki?
Kaitiaki is a noun.
What is the plural of kaitiaki?
The plural of kaitiaki is kaitiakis.

Words near kaitiaki in the dictionary

  1. kaiten
  2. Kaith
  3. Kaithal
  4. Kaithi
  5. Kaiths
  6. kaitiaki
  7. kaitiakis
  8. kaitiakitanga
  9. Kaitij
  10. Kaitlin
  11. Kaitlyn

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kaitiaki (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “kaitiaki.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kaitiaki. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.