Word.ws English Dictionary

kaona

kaona noun: a hidden or secondary meaning in Hawaiian poetry that can only be understood in cultural context; the use thereof.

Noun

kaona

  1. A hidden or secondary meaning in Hawaiian poetry that can only be understood in cultural context; the use thereof.
    • Without the knowledge of cultural codes in Hawaiian, foreigners who understood the language could still be counted on to miss kaona2004 September 7, Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 8

Origin of kaona

Borrowed from Hawaiian kaona, from Proto-Central Eastern Polynesian *taoŋa "treasured possession".

Questions about kaona

What does kaona mean?
Kaona means a hidden or secondary meaning in Hawaiian poetry that can only be understood in cultural context; the use thereof.
What part of speech is kaona?
Kaona is a noun.

Words near kaona in the dictionary

  1. kaolinosis
  2. kaolins
  3. kaomoji
  4. kaomojis
  5. kaon
  6. kaona
  7. kaonic
  8. kaonic hydrogen
  9. kaonium
  10. kaonlike
  11. kaons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kaona (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.

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