Word.ws English Dictionary

Land of the Long White Cloud

Land of the Long White Cloud proper noun: new Zealand.

Proper noun

the Land of the Long White Cloud

  1. (poetic) New Zealand.

Origin of Land of the Long White Cloud

Loose calque of Māori Aotearoa, from ao (“cloud, daytime, world”), tea (“white”), and roa (“long, tall”). Allegedly the first English-language mention was in the February, 1916, New Zealand School Journal (King, 2004). Probably a reference to the appearance of mountainous land when seen on the horizon from a canoe after an ocean voyage.

Questions about Land of the Long White Cloud

What does Land of the Long White Cloud mean?
Land of the Long White Cloud means new Zealand.
What part of speech is Land of the Long White Cloud?
Land of the Long White Cloud is a proper noun.

Words near Land of the Long White Cloud in the dictionary

  1. Land of the Ascendant Sun
  2. Land of the Dragon
  3. land of the free
  4. Land of the Leal
  5. land of the living
  6. Land of the Long White Cloud
  7. Land of the Morning Calm
  8. Land of the Red Dragon
  9. Land of the Rising Sun
  10. land on
  11. land on one's feet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Land of the Long White Cloud (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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