Word.ws English Dictionary

noa

noa adjective: non-taboo; serving to replace a taboo name or term.

Adjective (1)

noa (not comparable)

  1. Non-taboo; serving to replace a taboo name or term.
    • It vividly recalls the use of the same epithet in the name The Seven Haley Isles, a seamen's noa term for the Flannan Islands (SGS, xi, 88). A further striking parallel is offered by Eng. halibut lit. 'holy butt' and its many Germanic cognates, terms which certainly arose in a milieu conditioned by...1968, Scottish Gaelic Studies, page 25
    • The power of the spoken word has meant that some dangerous things are not mentioned by their "real" names, but by noa terms, like gullfot (literally "golden foot") for "wolf", or tallbjörn (literally "pine bear"), granoxe (literally: "fir ox"), trädräv (literally: "tree fox") or granälg (literally...2002, O. Bandle, editor, The Nordic Languages, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 291

Adjective (2)

noa (not comparable)

  1. (New Zealand, among the Maori) Non-sacred; such that it must be kept separate from what is taboo.
    Antonyms:
    tapu

Noun capitalized: NOA

NOA (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Nintendo of America.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: NoA

NoA

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Nintendo of America.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Noa

Noa (plural Noas)

  1. A surname.

Antonyms of noa

Forms of noa

pluralNoas

Origin of noa

From the Polynesian term noa, e.g. Hawaiian noa (“free of taboo”).

Borrowed from Māori noa.

Borrowed from Spanish Noa, a surname mostly found in Cuba. The surname could also derive from German Noä.

Questions about noa

What does noa mean?
Noa means non-taboo; serving to replace a taboo name or term.
What part of speech is noa?
Noa can be an adjective, a noun or a proper noun.

Words near noa in the dictionary

  1. no-win
  2. no-win situations
  3. no.
  4. No. 10
  5. No. 11
  6. noa
  7. NOAA
  8. NOAA Corps
  9. NOAC
  10. Noachian
  11. Noachian epoch

Source and license

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