Word.ws English Dictionary

kehua

kehua noun: a ghost; an evil spirit.

Noun

kehua (plural kehuas or kehua)

  1. (New Zealand) A ghost; an evil spirit.
    • An old man explained to me, “The spirits of dead persons are afflicting such sufferers. These kehua control them. If the afflicted person survives he will be the medium of that [evil] spirit. Some people become demented when so affected.”1906, Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand, page 228
    • The other aspect of the "etheric double" of the theosophist, that is the wraith or apparitional spirit seen after the death of the body, is the kehua of the Maori.1924, Elsdon Best, Māori Religion and Mythology: being an account of the cosmogony, anthropogeny, religious beliefs and rites, magic and folk lore of the Māori folk of New Zealand, Part 2, 2005, Te...

Forms of kehua

pluralkehuas
pluralkehua

Origin of kehua

Borrowed from Māori kēhua.

Questions about kehua

What does kehua mean?
Kehua means a ghost; an evil spirit.
What part of speech is kehua?
Kehua is a noun.
What is the plural of kehua?
The plural of kehua is kehuas.

Words near kehua in the dictionary

  1. Kehrer
  2. Kehrers
  3. Kehres
  4. Kehreses
  5. Kehrs
  6. kehua
  7. kehuas
  8. kehya
  9. kehyas
  10. Kehychivka
  11. kei

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kehua (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: “kehua.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kehua. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.