Māori slang: chur, meke, uce, cuz and their roots

Most of what gets called Māori slang is not Māori at all: chur is a New Zealand English word the Oxford English Dictionary links to “cheers”, cuz and bro are old English short forms of cousin and brother, and uce comes from the Samoan word uso, a same-sex sibling. What makes them sound Māori is who says them. Linguists count bro and cuz among the marks of Māori English, the variety of New Zealand English spoken by many Māori, and the slang that really is from te reo is older and quieter: half-pie, puckeroo, taihoa. This guide sorts each word by where it comes from, with the date it was first written down, and says where the accounts differ.

Updated 20 October 2026 · 8 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.

Māori slang at a glance

The first column is the word as it is heard in New Zealand; the third says which language it actually comes from. Dates are the earliest written evidence the Oxford English Dictionary has found, so a word is always older in speech.

Word	What it means	Where it comes from	First written
chur	cheers, thanks, hello, goodbye, well done	New Zealand English; the OED says perhaps an alteration of “cheers”	1997
cuz, cuzzy	cousin; a friend, as a form of address	English: coz, the old short form of cousin, plus -y	1891
cuzzy bro	a relative or close friend, usually a man	New Zealand English, chiefly in Māori contexts	1991
bro	brother; a male friend, as a form of address	English: a clipping of brother	before 1530
uce	brother (between men) or sister (between women)	Samoan uso, same-sex sibling	—
sweet as	excellent; fine, agreed	New Zealand English	1985
kia ora	hello; thanks	Māori kia ora ‘be well’	1889
kapai, ka pai	good, well done	Māori ka pai ‘good’	1836
half-pie	half-done, poorly planned	English half + Māori pai ‘good’	1902
puckeroo	broken, wrecked	Māori pakaru ‘smashed, broken’	1840s, as a verb
taihoa	wait, hang on	Māori taihoa ‘wait, by and by’	1842
mōrena	good morning	Māori, itself from English “morning”	1969
meke, tumeke	said to mean “awesome”	Māori words, but Te Aka gives them other meanings: see below	—

Kia ora, kai, puku, mahi and the other Māori words that every New Zealander uses are not really slang; they are ordinary New Zealand English, and they have their own guide: Māori words in New Zealand English.

What does chur mean, and where does it come from?

Chur means cheers, thanks or good on you, and it can also say hello, goodbye or agree with what was just said. The Oxford English Dictionary added it in March 2023 and defines it as an interjection similar to “cheers!”, used to express good wishes on meeting or departing, or thanks and approval. Its earliest written example is from Wellington’s Dominion newspaper in 1997.

Chris Bourke’s history of the word for AudioCulture, the New Zealand music archive, takes it back much further, to the Howard Morrison Quartet’s Showtime Spectacular tour of 1961. There the phrase was “Chur, doy”. The doy was “boy” said the way a ventriloquist on the tour, Jon Zealando, had to say it: a B cannot be said without moving the lips, so he turned it into a D, and the Quartet copied him from the side of the stage. Sir Howard Morrison then used the phrase so much that Bourke calls him its means of distribution. When the OED took the word in, the NZ Herald quoted the Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson remembering that Morrison and other Māori musicians “used chur all the time. It drove me crazy.”

So chur is a word made in Māori company and spread by Māori entertainers, but it is not a word of te reo Māori. Bourke notes that in the last few decades it has taken the place that “choice” had in the early 1980s.

Cuz, bro and sis: English words, Māori English

Bro, cuz and sis are English. The OED traces bro, as a shortening of brother, to before 1530, and cuzzy to coz, the old short form of cousin, with its earliest evidence in 1891. What is distinctive in New Zealand is how they are used. In a 1999 study of Māori students at the University of Canterbury, the linguist Jeanette King found that terms of kinship, bro (brother), cuz (cousin, of either sex), sis (sister) and bub (a younger woman), were a particular feature of Māori English, used to address friends as family. Her participants called the variety itself “bro talk”.

Two details from that study are worth knowing. These words are used to people of the same or a younger generation, never to older people, so you would not call a kuia ‘female elder’ cuz. And they do a job: one student said that using bro and cuz lets you tell at once whether someone identifies as Māori, and another described the pleasure of walking around and saying “kia ora, sis”. Elizabeth Gordon, writing in Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, adds that Māori English is not spoken by all Māori, and is spoken by some Pākehā who live and work closely with Māori.

The longer form has its own entry. The OED added cuzzy bro in 2025, a term for a relative or close friend and a familiar way to address a man, first found in the Dominion in 1991, and listed it among words originating in te reo Māori or used chiefly in Māori contexts. Its parts, cuzzy and bro, are both English.

Te reo Māori has its own words for these people, and they are more precise than bro and sis: a man’s elder brother and a woman’s elder sister are both tuakana, and the younger ones are teina. They are all in Māori family words.

Uce: a Samoan word, not a Māori one

Uce, also written uso, is Samoan. The Samoan word uso means a sibling of the same sex: a man’s brother, or a woman’s sister. George Pratt’s nineteenth-century Samoan dictionary records it as “same-sex sibling”, and the Polynesian Lexicon Project finds the same word, as uho, in Tokelauan. As slang it works the same way: a man calls another man uce, and a woman calls another woman uce. An ABC News report in 2021 described it as coined by the Samoan diaspora in the United States and New Zealand a couple of decades earlier, and already spreading into Australian speech.

Māori has no word uso for a sibling. It does have a relative of the word: the Polynesian Lexicon Project traces Samoan uso “umbilical cord” and Māori uho ‘umbilical cord, heart of a tree’ to the same ancient root, and cross-refers the sibling word to it. How Samoan and Māori words line up in general is in Māori vs Samoan and Tongan.

What does meke mean?

In te reo Māori, meke means to punch: Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives “to strike with the fist, punch”, and the noun “a blow of the fist”. Its doubled form mekemeke means to punch repeatedly or to box, and a meke pōro is a volleyball.

The “awesome” meaning people look up usually comes from tumeke, often written tu meke or too meke. Te Aka records tumeke only as “to be surprised, shocked, take fright, frightened, startled”, and neither Te Aka nor the OED records an “awesome” sense, so where the slang use came from is undocumented. The explanation on many slang lists, that it means “too much”, has no source behind it.

The jump from fright to praise is a real one in te reo, though. The standard way to say awesome is Ka mau te wehi! ‘how awesome!’, built on wehi ‘fear, awe’: Te Aka glosses it “how terrible! how terrific! fantastic! awesome! how frightening”, and says it is often used to praise something or someone’s work. English made the same move with terrific.

Slang that really comes from Māori

Several of the Māori words in Kiwi slang were in written English by the 1840s, and some were reshaped so far that they no longer look Māori.

Kapai, from ka pai ‘good’. The OED’s first example is from 1836, and Te Ara notes that the missionary printer William Colenso was writing it into his English from 1843.
Half-pie, meaning half-done or poorly planned, is half English: the OED derives it from English half and Māori pai ‘good’, with its first example in the Otago Witness in 1902.
Puckeroo, meaning broken or wrecked, is Māori pakaru ‘smashed, broken’ said with English sounds. The OED records it as a verb from the 1840s and as an adjective from 1911.
Taihoa, wait or hang on, is first recorded in English in 1842. The OED notes that English went on to make a noun and a verb of it, meaning delay and to put off.
Couch kūmara and tall ponga, Te Ara’s examples of English sayings remade with Māori words: a couch potato with a kūmara ‘sweet potato’ in it, and a tall poppy turned into a tree fern, a ponga ‘silver fern’. A huiette is a small hui ‘meeting’.

Slang inside te reo Māori

Te reo has a casual register of its own, and Te Aka records it. These are words you might hear between friends speaking Māori, not words borrowed into English.

Māori	What it means	Te Aka’s note
tā, e tā	man, bro	A term of address for a male friend.
korokē	bloke, fellow, guy, bro	It also means eccentric, unorthodox.
Karawhiua!	go for it! give it heaps!	Encouragement.
Hōhā!	what a nuisance! boring!	Hōhā tahi koe! ‘you’re a real nuisance!’ is Te Aka’s example of impatience.
Ka mau te wehi!	awesome!	Praise, and sometimes real fright.
rawe	excellent, great	Said of anything excellent.
taihoa	wait, hang on, not yet	First recorded in English in 1842.

Te reo has stronger language as well, which is a different subject: see Māori swear words. And one word that New Zealanders hear about every day, and sometimes mistake for slang, is the subject of what does Pākehā mean?

Where the accounts differ

Word	One account	Another account
chur	The OED: perhaps an alteration of “cheers”, first written in 1997.	AudioCulture: the phrase “Chur, doy” was in use on the Howard Morrison Quartet’s 1961 tour; it does not say chur came from cheers.
tu meke	Slang lists: “awesome”, from “too much”, with no source given.	Te Aka: tumeke means surprised, shocked, startled; no “awesome” sense recorded.
uce	ABC News (2021): coined by the Samoan diaspora in the US and New Zealand.	No dictionary we checked dates the slang spelling uce.

From slang to the language underneath

Kiwi slang carries a little te reo inside it, kapai and half-pie and kia ora, but only a little. If the Māori words are the part that interests you, Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course starts from the most common words, and the greetings people actually use are in Māori greetings.