Māori swear words and insults: why to be careful

The strongest Māori swear words are curses rather than rude words for the body: pokokōhua ‘boiled head’, which Te Aka Māori Dictionary calls a very strong curse, and kai a te kurī ‘food of the dog’, a strong curse it compares to the strongest English expletives. Below them come curses of disdain such as tō tero! ‘up yours!’ and insults like taurekareka ‘scoundrel, idiot’. If you searched what teke means in Māori, teke is the anatomical word for the vagina; Te Aka lists it plainly, with no curse built on it. This page gives each word with Te Aka’s own meaning, how strong it is, and why curses about the head land so hard in Māori.

Updated 20 October 2026 · 7 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 curses, strongest first

Māori	Literally	Te Aka’s meaning	Say it
pokokōhua	boiled head	a very strong curse; an expression of anger, or of not wanting to do something	paw-kaw-KAW-hoo-ah
kai a te kurī	food of the dog	a strong curse, anger or hatred; also damn, vile, and so-and-so	kai ah teh koo-REE
tō tero!	your anus	up yours! stuff you! get stuffed!	TAW teh-raw
ō raho!	your testicles	go away! get lost! said only to or about a man	AW rah-haw
tou parahua		a curse, a swear word	toe pah-rah-hoo-ah

None of these translates word for word. Te Aka says of both pokokōhua and kai a te kurī that the strength of feeling behind them “is not conveyed” by the literal English, and that how strong they are “depends on the ferocity of the delivery by the speaker”. Te Aka’s own translations of its examples reach for b*gger and b*stard.

How rude is each one?

This scale uses only the words Te Aka itself chooses for each entry, so nothing on it is a guess:

Level	What Te Aka calls it	Words
4	a very strong curse	pokokōhua, upokokōhua, pōkokohua
3	a strong curse, equivalent to strong English expletives	kai a te kurī
2	a curse used to show disdain, telling someone to keep their opinion to themselves	tō tero!, ō raho!, tou parahua
1	no curse label: name-calling	taurekareka, heahea, kūare, pōrangi
–	not swearing at all: the ordinary word for a body part	teke, ure, raho, tero, tou, tūtae

Delivery matters as much as the word. One of Te Aka’s examples of pokokōhua is a complaint about the weather: Pokokōhua! Kua ua anō, “B*gger! It’s raining again.” Its example of kai a te kurī, said together with pōkokohua, is a grandparent speaking to the drunk driver who killed their grandchild. The same curse covers both.

Pokokōhua: why a boiled head is the worst insult

Pokokōhua joins upoko ‘head’ and kōhua ‘to boil; a cooking pot’. Te Aka gives the reason it is so strong in one sentence: “Because the head is tapu in traditional Māori society, to boil it would have been the ultimate insult.” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand supplies the two halves of that. “The head was traditionally the most tapu part of the body,” it says in its story on Māori adornment. And in its story on feasts it explains that food is noa ‘ordinary, free from tapu’, and that “much care was taken with food to ensure it did not infringe upon tapu”. Te Aka’s own example for tapu is a canoe so tapu that no cooked food was carried on it.

So the curse puts the most tapu part of a person into the pot, the thing most carefully kept apart from it. What tapu and noa mean more fully is in Māori words with no English equivalent.

Te Aka lists the word three ways, all with the same meaning:

Spelling	Te Aka entry	Note
pokokōhua	verb to curse; interjection	the long vowel on the kō of kōhua
pōkokohua	verb to curse, cuss; interjection; noun, a term of contempt for someone	the long vowel moved to the first syllable
upokokōhua	interjection	with the full word upoko

Used as a noun it means a person: Te Aka’s example has someone complain that they have been done in by “that b*gger, Heramia”.

Kai a te kurī

Kai a te kurī is literally the food of the dog. Te Aka gives it three jobs: an exclamation of anger or hatred; a describing word meaning damn, vile, as in an example from 1884 calling tobacco “that damn weed”; and a noun, so-and-so, for a person you despise. The dog is the point: Te Ara records that Māori sayings about the kurī were mostly terms of scorn, as Māori pet names explains.

Tō tero and ō raho: telling someone to be quiet

Te Aka describes tō tero! and ō raho! in the same words: a curse “used to show disdain for the actions or statements of others, implying that they would be advised not to comment”. Its example of the first:

Pare: E hoa, tino hē nei tō reo Pākehā!
Rangi: Tō tero e tā.
“Pare: Friend, your English is abysmal! Rangi: Get stuffed my friend.”

Te Aka prints the first word of each in brackets because it is a possessive and changes with the person meant. Its example for raho is about two other people, so it reads Ō rāua raho, “They can get lost”. Te Aka adds that ō raho! is only said to, or about, a man.

Insults that are not swearing

These are name-calling. Te Aka gives none of them a curse label, but none is polite:

Māori	Te Aka’s meaning	Say it
taurekareka	a slave or captive taken in war; as an insult, scoundrel, idiot, rascal, rogue; as a describing word, dastardly, shameful, low	toe-reh-kah-reh-kah
heahea	foolish, silly; a fool, idiot, buffoon	heh-ah-heh-ah
kūare	ignorant, naive, uninformed; also low in the social scale, held in no esteem (also spelt kūware)	KOO-ah-reh
pōrangi	mad, crazy; also mentally ill, deranged	PAW-rah-ngee

Taurekareka can be as mild as English idiot. Te Aka’s example is Ko wai te taurekareka nāna nei i waiho te hō ki konei takoto ai?, “Who was the idiot who left the spade lying here?” Its older meaning, a slave taken in war, is what gives it weight when it is meant.

Pōrangi is worth avoiding as an insult for another reason: Te Aka’s senses for it include mentally ill, so the word lands on real people. Words for the mind chosen to carry no stigma are described in takiwātanga.

Hōhā is often mistaken for a swear word because it is said with feeling, but Te Aka gives it as bored, fed up: Kua hōhā au. ‘I’m fed up.’ It is one of the everyday Māori words for feelings. Casual words that are not insults at all belong to Māori slang.

What does teke mean in Māori?

Teke means the vagina or female genitals. Te Aka has a single entry for it, with no curse built on it and no label marking it offensive. It belongs with the other words for the private parts of the body, which in Māori are the ordinary anatomical words, not swear words in themselves:

Māori	Te Aka’s meaning	Also used in
teke	vagina, female genitals	–
ure	penis	ure tārewa, the senior male line of descent
raho	testicle; also labia majora	the curse ō raho!; a separate word raho means a floor or platform
tero	rectum, anus	the curse tō tero!; the idiom kua pī te tero ‘full as a bull’
tou	anus, posterior	the curse tou parahua; also to plant and other unrelated words
tiko	to defecate; faeces	–
tūtae	dung, faeces, sh*t, droppings	the first part of several plant names

That these words are not swearing in themselves shows in how they are used. Ure appears in the vocabulary of whakapapa, and Te Aka records a proverb built on ure and raho whose meaning it gives as “People make a leader”. Like their English equivalents, they become rude when aimed at someone, as in tō tero!. The rest of the body is in Māori body parts.

Kanga: the Māori word for swearing

To curse or swear is kanga, which Te Aka gives as “to curse, swear, verbally abuse”, and as a noun, a curse. Swearing a lot is kangakanga, also the word for profanities. To tell someone not to swear: Kaua e kanga! ‘Don’t swear!’ Te Aka’s first example, from 1861, is a piece of old advice:

Kanga kau ana te tangata ki a koe, e kore rawa e piri tana kanga ki a koe; hoki ana anō tana kanga ki a ia, hei whakamate anō i a ia.
“When a man swears at you, his curse will not affect you; his curse returns to himself to destroy him.”

Why to be careful

A curse is not a word, it is an act. The strongest Māori curses are aimed at a person’s head, the most tapu part of them, and the 1861 example shows a curse treated as something that can rebound. Saying one for effect is not the same as an English learner saying b*gger.
Delivery sets the strength. Te Aka says so of each strong curse, and a learner cannot judge delivery in a language they are still learning.
The head is the target. Te Ara calls the head the most tapu part of the body. That is why a boiled head is the worst curse, and a reason to keep someone’s head out of jokes altogether.
Recognise, do not use. Knowing pokokōhua tells you how angry someone is. It is not a word to try out on a marae, with elders, or in a class.

How Māori compares with other languages is set out in the most common swear word in each language, and one more language’s curses, rated on a dictionary-built scale like this one, are in Shanghainese swear words. The words a learner needs first, rather than last, are in Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course.