English words in Māori: from tīhi to pahikara

English words in Māori are everywhere once you know the trick: tīhi ‘cheese’, hōiho ‘horse’, pahikara ‘bicycle’ and hōhipera ‘hospital’ are all English words, respelt for a language with ten consonants, no consonant clusters, and a vowel at the end of every syllable. Linguists call them loanwords, and Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives three Māori terms for one: kupu mino, kupu pōriro and kupu whakawhiti. They are not a fringe: in a study of the thousand commonest words in spoken Māori broadcasting, nearly one in ten came from English. This guide lists forty of them with the English word behind each, shows the handful of sound rules that turn sheep into hipi and Christmas into Kirihimete, and explains why modern Māori often prefers a new Māori word, like rorohiko ‘computer’, to a borrowed one.

Updated 25 October 2026 · 13 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

English words in Māori: forty to recognise

Each of these is marked as a loan in Te Aka Māori Dictionary, and the English word it comes from is either Te Aka’s own gloss or the derivation given by John Moorfield and Tania Ka‘ai in their study of loanwords in the Māori-language newspapers. The last column says what changed, using the rules set out in the next section.

Food has its own set, from āporo ‘apple’ to rēwena ‘leavened bread’, in Māori food words, and farm animals such as kau ‘cow’ and rāpeti ‘rabbit’ are in Māori birds and animals.

How Māori reshapes an English word

Two facts about Māori do almost all the work. Its sound system has ten consonants, p t k m n ng r w wh h, and five vowels. And a Māori syllable is a vowel or a single consonant followed by a vowel, so, as Marta Degani puts it, no Māori word may end in a consonant and no two consonants may occur together. An English word has to be brought inside both rules. Moorfield and Ka‘ai add that, unlike some other Polynesian languages such as Samoan, Māori did not take new sounds from English: every English sound is replaced by the nearest Māori one.

The sounds Māori does not have

This is the summary table Moorfield and Ka‘ai give, with examples from their lists and Degani’s. The word usually matters: each rule has exceptions.

English f is not in the table, and the loans show why: it goes both ways. It is p in Pēpuere ‘February’ and pāmu ‘farm’, and wh in hāwhe ‘half’, kāwhe ‘calf’ and whutupōro ‘football’. The wh loans brought something new with them: Moorfield and Ka‘ai, following J. S. Ryan, note that the syllables wo, wu, who and whu do not seem to have existed in Māori before contact, and arrived in words like wūru ‘wool’ and whutupōro. Why each wh is said is in the Māori pronunciation guide.

Clusters and final consonants

• A vowel goes on the end. An English word ending in a consonant gets a final vowel. Often it copies the vowel before it, as in wiki ‘week’, poaka ‘pig’ and miraka ‘milk’; often it does not, as in kapu ‘cup’, rūma ‘room’ and poti ‘boat’. After the ai sound it is usually a: wāina ‘wine’, tāima ‘time’, raina ‘line’.
• A vowel goes between consonants. Clusters are split up: pikitia ‘picture’, tiriti ‘treaty’, karaka ‘clock’.
• Or a consonant is dropped. An s before another consonant usually disappears: toa ‘store’, tōkena ‘stocking’, teihana ‘station’, and tiriti ‘street’. Degani gives nama ‘number’ as an English cluster reduced to one consonant.
• An s that becomes h brings an i. Moorfield and Ka‘ai cite the linguist Kate Kearns, who showed that where an English sibilant becomes h, the vowel inserted next to it is usually i: pirihimana ‘policeman’, hōhipera ‘hospital’, kaunihera ‘council’, Ahitereiria ‘Australia’.

Most words use several rules at once. Degani’s example is karaka ‘clock’: a vowel splits cl, l becomes r, the English vowel changes, and a final vowel is added.

One spelling, several words

With ten consonants instead of twenty-four, different English words often land on the same Māori spelling. Te Aka lists each of these as a separate loan:

A loan can also share its spelling with an older Māori word that has nothing to do with it. These pairs are worth knowing, because the native word is usually the one in a proverb or a place name:

Degani suggests the older word sometimes eased the loan in. Snow and foam look like sugar, and that resemblance may have helped huka mean both.

Borrowed words behave like Māori words

A loan does not stay a frozen English noun. Moorfield and Ka‘ai found that loans take the same prefixes and endings as every other Māori word, and shift between word classes the same way:

• Tākuta ‘doctor’ is also a verb, to practise medicine, in Te Aka, with the passive ending -tia; rōia ‘lawyer’ can mean to be a lawyer.
• The prefix kai-, the doer of an action, makes kaipeita ‘painter’ from peita, paint.
• The causative whaka- makes whakakīngi ‘to make king’ from kīngi, king.
• Meanings move. Wāina is wine, grape and also, in Te Aka, a kūmara variety introduced in the 19th century. Waea, from wire, came to mean cable, telephone and telegram, and tina, which Moorfield and Ka‘ai derive from dinner, is lunch in Te Aka.

How many Māori words come from English?

More than a beginner expects, and not only in technical vocabulary. Degani analysed the thousand most frequent words in the Māori Broadcast Corpus, about a million words of Māori radio and television from 1995 and 1996, and found that 9.5% of them were English borrowings, nearly all nouns. Her three most frequent loans each occurred more than a thousand times: kura ‘school’, pikitia ‘picture’ and māmā ‘mum’. Her list runs through food, money and measurement, sport, school, transport, clothing and family; whether kura belongs on it at all is one of the disputed cases below.

The written record is larger still. Terry Duval’s doctoral thesis found over 2,500 borrowed items in printed Māori from 1815 to 1899, most of them to do with Christianity, technology, trade and law. Moorfield and Ka‘ai’s Kupu Arotau project collected 18,256 headwords from the Māori-language newspapers of 1842 to 1939 and the 1952 Māori Bible; 13,058 of them were proper nouns (6,761 personal names and 3,989 place names among them) and 3,903 were ordinary nouns. That database is now Te Aka’s historical loanwords dictionary. How many words a learner needs, and which ones, is the subject of how many Māori words you need.

Not every loan is English. Moorfield and Ka‘ai single out two from French that are still current, mīere ‘honey’ from miel and Wīwī ‘French, France’ from oui oui, and Degani gives ture ‘law’ as coming from Hebrew torah. Te Aka notes that niu ‘coconut palm’ was adopted recently from other Polynesian languages, and Degani reports that it was preferred to the English loan kokonati.

Transliteration or new word: rorohiko and ngaruiti

Borrowing was the ordinary way to name new things through the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the 1970s, Degani writes, attitudes changed: some speakers, especially those working to keep Māori “pure”, avoided English loans and coined new words instead. Moorfield and Ka‘ai describe the aversion as found mainly among second-language learners, and say it has caused comprehension problems between older native speakers and younger speakers coming out of Māori-medium schools.

Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission, set up in 1987, has been the main source of new words since. Degani, summarising the linguist Ray Harlow, lists the Commission’s methods: giving an existing word a specialised meaning, deriving words by reduplication or affixes, shortening existing terms, keeping terms brief and transparent, and describing a thing in a phrase, but not borrowing from English. An article from the Commission’s newsletter He Muka (September 1991), republished on its website, says that where a genuine Māori word is known the Commission hopes people will hold to it rather than to a word taken from the sound of the English. Its example is a hui at which someone asked for a word for microwave: the English was taken apart into micro and wave, and the hui settled on ngaruiti ‘microwave’, from ngaru ‘wave’ and iti ‘small’. The same article says the Commission does not insist that people follow its words, and cannot object if someone has a better one. Its dictionary of new words, Te Matatiki (1996), has over 2,000 entries and, Moorfield and Ka‘ai note, few loans.

The dislike of loans is not only modern. Moorfield and Ka‘ai describe an article in the newspaper Te Pipiwharauroa by its editor Rēweti Kōhere of Ngāti Porou, listing 47 loans used where, in his view, a Māori word already existed. A little over half are still in common use. They suggest many survived because the new thing really was different: pera ‘pillow’ stayed alongside urunga ‘pillow’ because the introduced pillow was not the traditional one. The same debate reached the calendar: Degani reports that the Commission proposed Māori names for the months in place of Hānuere and the rest; both sets are in Māori numbers, days and months.

Where the accounts differ

Deciding whether a word is borrowed is not always simple, and the dictionaries and studies do not always agree. Te Aka is the dictionary John Moorfield compiled, so its “(loan)” label usually matches his and Ka‘ai’s study; Degani identified loans by their sounds and says dictionaries proved inadequate for the job.

Names, places and the church

Names were transliterated by the same rules, and in huge numbers: personal names are the largest group in the Kupu Arotau database. Te Aka lists Hōne or Hone for John, Wiremu for William, Mere for Mary and Rāwiri for David, all as loan personal names, and Māori baby names has more. Surnames follow patterns: Moorfield and Ka‘ai found names ending in -son usually ending in -hana or -hona, so Thompson is Tāmihana and Wilson is Wirihana.

Places and peoples too: Pōneke ‘Wellington’ comes from Port Nicholson, Ahitereiria ‘Australia’ from its English name, and Ingarihi ‘English’ names the language and its speakers. The missionaries’ vocabulary is full of loans: Kirihimete ‘Christmas’, hāhi ‘church’, Ihu for Jesus and Karaiti for Christ. But not every church word is borrowed. Atua ‘God’ is a Māori word, which Te Aka glosses first as an ancestor with continuing influence, a god or supernatural being.

Can you guess them?

Each of these is an English word in Māori, and none is in the table at the top. Say it aloud, apply the rules, then open the answer.

• kirikiti
  Answer

  cricket, the sport: a vowel splits cr and another closes the word
• motokā
  Answer

  car: from motorcar
• tāone
  Answer

  town, city
• pikitia
  Answer

  picture, film
• tōtiti
  Answer

  sausage: both s sounds become t
• rakiraki
  Answer

  duck: from duck, with d as r and the word doubled
• panana
  Answer

  banana: b becomes p
• wūru
  Answer

  wool: one of the syllables Māori gained from English
• kāpene
  Answer

  captain
• hū
  Answer

  shoe: sh becomes h, and nothing else is needed

One loanword every New Zealander hears in December has its own page: Merry Christmas in Māori.

Going further

Borrowing runs the other way too, from kai ‘food’ to whānau ‘family’: those words are in Māori words in New Zealand English, and the rugby field’s loans, from whutupōro to hāwhe ‘halfback’, are in rugby in Māori. To learn the loans in their sentences, Verbavia’s te reo Māori course uses everyday ones like tēpu ‘table’ and pēpi ‘baby’ from the first lessons.

Sources

1. Moorfield, J. C. and Ka‘ai, T. M. (2009). Ngā Kupu Arotau – eweri tāima: loanwords in Māori 1842–1952. Te Kaharoa 2(1). Summarises Ryan (1972), Kearns (1990), Duval (1995), Harlow (1993, 2004) and Moorfield and Paterson (2002).
2. Degani, M. (2012). Language contact in New Zealand: a focus on English lexical borrowings in Māori. Academic Journal of Modern Philology 1, 13–24.
3. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori. He Hokinga Mahara – Ngā Mahi Waihanga Kupu Hou o Mua (from He Muka, September 1991).
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kupu mino, kupu pōriro, kupu whakawhiti (loanword)
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tīhi (loan) — cheese
6. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hōiho (loan) — horse
7. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pahikara (loan) — bicycle
8. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hōhipera (loan) — hospital
9. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pata (loan) — butter
10. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pēke (loans) — bag; bank; to back up
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: huka — snow, foam; sugar (loan)
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hipi — sheep
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: wāina (loan) — wine, grape, kūmara variety
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: waea (loan) — telephone, wire; waea pūkoro
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tina — fixed; lunch (loan)
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tākuta (loan) — doctor; to practise medicine
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pea, tīni, kōti, tiriti, piriti — separate loans
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kau, karaka, toa, tiaki, kapu, pia, poaka — native word and loan
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rorohiko — computer
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: roro — brain
21. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hiko — electric
22. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ngaruiti — microwave
23. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pouaka whakaata — television
24. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pouaka makariri — refrigerator
25. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pukapuka — lungs, rangiora; book
26. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kura — red, treasure; school
27. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pouaka — box
28. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rino (loan) — iron
29. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: putiputi (loan) — flower
30. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: niu — coconut palm, recently adopted from other Polynesian languages
31. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mīere (loan) — honey
32. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Wīwī (loan) — France, French
33. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ture (loan) — law
34. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Pōneke (loan) — Wellington
35. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Hōne, Hone, Wiremu, Mere, Rāwiri, Tāmihana, Wirihana (loan personal names)
36. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: atua — ancestor with continuing influence, god