Word.ws English Dictionary

whangai

whangai noun: a traditional Maori form of adoption practised within the extended family.

Noun

whangai (countable and uncountable, plural whangais)

  1. (New Zealand, uncountable) A traditional Maori form of adoption practised within the extended family.
  2. (New Zealand, countable) A child adopted under this system.

Forms of whangai

pluralwhangais

Origin of whangai

Borrowed from Māori whāngai.

Questions about whangai

What does whangai mean?
Whangai means a traditional Maori form of adoption practised within the extended family.
What part of speech is whangai?
Whangai is a noun.
What is the plural of whangai?
The plural of whangai is whangais.

Words near whangai in the dictionary

  1. whang leather
  2. whang leathers
  3. whang-doodle
  4. whang-doodles
  5. Whangaehu
  6. whangai
  7. whangais
  8. Whanganui
  9. Whangarei
  10. whangdoodle
  11. whangdoodles

Source and license

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