Hawaiian Dictionary Mary Pukui

Working with the Pukui Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary

The 1986 edition from Bishop Museum Press is still the reference everyone falls back on. I've used it across dozens of translation projects and genealogical research assignments, and it remains the most reliable printed resource you can buy. The electronic versions floating around are useful, but they cut corners on the glosses and skip entire entries that the print version includes. If you're doing serious work, start with the print book.

I ran into a specific problem last year while translating a late-1800s probate document. The text used the word kua in a context that didn't match any of the standard definitions. The dictionary lists it as "back," "opposite side," "former," and a few other things, but nothing fit what was clearly being described—a kind of ancestral or inherited right tied to land. I spent about forty minutes cross-referencing the Pukui Dictionary entries with the Place Names of Hawaii volume, also by Pukui, and found that kua in that particular dialectal usage carried a meaning related to upstream or ancestral territory that neither volume explained directly. The workaround was checking the footnotes in the Hawaiian Word Book (also Pukui) for the regional variant and confirming with a native speaker who grew up on Kauai. The dictionary is brilliant at covering the standard Lelewa dialect but leaves gaps for older pidgin-influenced usage and regional speech patterns.

Where to find the Hawaiian Dictionary Mary Pukui

You can order the Bishop Museum Press edition directly from their website or through major booksellers. The ISBN is 0-938601-25-5. There are PDF scans circulating on academic sites and archive.org, but be aware that scanning quality varies and some entries get dropped in the OCR process. I've seen at least three different digital versions with missing pages around the w section, so if you're referencing a PDF, verify any entry you pull by checking the physical book. The digital copy from the University of Hawaii library system under their HSPA collection is the most complete version I've seen, though it's restricted to on-campus IP access.

For people doing casual learning rather than research, the online Paniolo Dictionary and the Hawaiian Language Online resources are fine. They use Pukui's work as a foundation but simplify the glosses. That's acceptable for building vocabulary. It's not acceptable when you need the full philological notes, alternate spellings, and cultural usage notes that the original edition provides.

How the dictionary is structured

Entries are organized by Hawaiian spelling, not English alphabetization of translations. Each headword includes the part of speech, the primary definitions, and then regional or dialectal variants listed separately. The orthography uses the kahakō (macron) and okina consistently, which matters because ka, kā, and k’a are treated as distinct entries. This is one thing beginners miss—they skip over entries with diacritics assuming they're the same word. They're not. The pronunciation difference changes the meaning entirely, and the dictionary reflects that with separate entries.

Each entry also includes sample phrases, which is where the real value sits. A bare definition like "love; affection; compassion" for aloha doesn't capture how the word functions in actual usage. The sample phrases in the Pukui dictionary show the grammatical constructions and contexts where the word appears. I always read the examples first before looking at the definition list because the examples usually clarify which sense of a polysemous word applies in a given situation. Another issue: the dictionary doesn't include many loanwords that entered Hawaiian after the main compilation period, particularly terms from English legal and technical vocabulary that have been adopted into modern Hawaiian. If you're working with contemporary documents, you'll need a supplementary resource like the Pūnana o ka Lei dictionary or the online Hawaiian Dictionary maintained by theULHawaiianLanguage.org project, which incorporates newer entries. I've also found that the glosses sometimes rely on English words that are themselves ambiguous. The entry for pono gives "righteousness; justice; moral; correct; proper" as primary definitions, but none of those English words capture the full Hawaiian concept. In practice, pono in a Hawaiian context often means "in balance" or "aligned with natural order," which is a completely different frame of reference than the English definitions suggest. The workaround is to read the sample phrases and let the context override the English gloss. Don't trust the English translation more than the Hawaiian usage examples.

What the dictionary leaves out

There's no index of English glosses, which means if you know the English word you're looking for and want to find the Hawaiian equivalent, you have to search manually through the entries. This is a genuine bottleneck. I've spent twenty to thirty minutes looking up a single word this way because the English translation I remembered didn't match the gloss exactly. The workaround is to use the Hawaiian-English section at the back of the book, which is essentially a reverse index, but it's abbreviated and doesn't cover every entry in the main volume. The coverage is roughly seventy percent of the headwords, so you'll hit dead ends.

The dictionary also doesn't include pronunciation guides beyond the diacritical marks. If you're learning to read the language and need phonetic help, you'll need a separate resource. Learn to Speak Hawaiian by Pukui and Savignon covers pronunciation in detail, and it pairs well with the dictionary as a companion volume. If you're doing professional translation or linguistic analysis, the Pukui dictionary is still the baseline. Just don't treat it as complete. It's a reference work compiled over decades of fieldwork, and it shows both the depth of that work and the limitations of its era. Cross-reference it, check the examples, and verify against newer sources when you're working with modern Hawaiian.