Word.ws English Dictionary

popolo

popolo noun: black nightshade (Solanum nigrum).

Noun

popolo (countable and uncountable, plural popolos)

  1. (Hawaii) black nightshade (Solanum nigrum).
    • The only lack of Kalelealuaka and his comrades was animal food (literally fish) but they supplied its place as well as they could with such herbs as the tender leaves of the popolo, which they cooked like spinach, and with inamona made from the roasted nuts of the kukui tree.1883, All about Hawaii, page 36
    • Popolo is a branching green herb with a tendency to being woody at the base. This annual grows one to three feet high on cultivated land and is regarded as a common weed.1975, L. R. McBride, Practical folk medicine of Hawaii, page 67
  2. (Hawaii, countable, pejorative, slang, sometimes) A black person.
    • Well, I'm a Hawaiian, but my father was a black-assed popolo—a Portuguese from Bravas, Cabo Verde Islands, who changed his name.2004, Miles M. Jackson, Social Process in Hawaii - Volume 43, page 92
    • When he gets to third, Fe'ao is excited. He sees Curaçao's thir baseman, Denjerick Virginie, starting at him as he slaps his hands together. "What you looking at, popolo?" he barks.2007, Charles Euchner, Little League, Big Dreams, →ISBN

Examples of popolo in a sentence

  • This mite was collected at the Maui Community College agricultural field (Kahului) on popolo berry on 19 July 1995 by C.1998, Hawaiian Entomological Society, Proceedings of the Hawaiian Entomological Society:
  • He turned and went back at the call of the messenger, taking some popolo fruit and leaves in his cloak.2011, William D. Westervelt, Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods, →ISBN:
  • I think that most people in Hawaii agree with my mother-in-law's view of Barry as a good Hawaiian boy; a popolo Hawaiian boy, but a Hawaiian boy nonetheless.2010, Dave Burgess, A Tale of Two Brothers, →ISBN, page 176:
  • They teased that Chad and I were popolo, Hawaiian slang for black people.2014, Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, →ISBN:

Forms of popolo

pluralpopolos

Origin of popolo

Borrowed from Hawaiian pōpolo from Proto-Polynesian *polo; cognate with Māori poroporo and pōporo (Solanum aviculare), Tongan polo (“Solanum nigrum”) and Tuvaluan 'opolo (“capsicum”). Skin color meaning comes from analogy to the color of its berries.

Questions about popolo

What does popolo mean?
Popolo means black nightshade (Solanum nigrum).
How do you use popolo in a sentence?
This mite was collected at the Maui Community College agricultural field (Kahului) on popolo berry on 19 July 1995 by C.
What part of speech is popolo?
Popolo is a noun.
What is the plural of popolo?
The plural of popolo is popolos.

Words near popolo in the dictionary

  1. popodums
  2. popoff
  3. popoffs
  4. popoi
  5. Popolari
  6. popolo
  7. Popoloca
  8. Popolocan
  9. Popoloco
  10. popolos
  11. Popoluca

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: popolo (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.

Last updated:

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