Word.ws English Dictionary

maraes

maraes is the plural of marae.

Meaning of marae

Noun

marae (plural maraes)

  1. (New Zealand) The courtyard of a Maori wharenui or meeting-house, seen as a cultural and spiritual focal point.
  2. (broadly) The buildings and people around it; a spiritual or cultural centre.
  3. (dated) A Polynesian sacred altar or enclosure.
    • The path ended down by the sea at a crumbling ‘ingot’ of black coral, twenty yards in length & in height two men. ‘A marae, this is called,’ Mr Wagstaff informed me. ‘All over the South Seas you see ’em, I’m told.’2004, David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, London: Sceptre (Hodder and Stoughton), →ISBN

Questions about maraes

What is maraes the plural of?
Maraes is the plural of marae.

Words near maraes in the dictionary

  1. maradolipids
  2. Maradona
  3. Maradonaesque
  4. Maradonian
  5. marae
  6. maraes
  7. marafiviral
  8. marafivirus
  9. marafiviruses
  10. Maragata
  11. Maragatas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maraes (page history and authors); marae (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: “maraes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/maraes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.