What does Māori mean? And te reo, tangata whenua

What does Māori mean? Before it was the name of a people, māori ‘normal, usual, natural, ordinary; native’ was an everyday Māori word, and it still is: Te Aka Māori Dictionary’s first sense is “normal, usual, natural, common, ordinary”, and its second includes “native, indigenous” and “fresh (of water)”. In the 19th century, meeting newcomers from overseas, the people of Aotearoa came to call themselves tangata māori ‘ordinary people’, and the word became their name. Te reo ‘the language’ means “the language”, so te reo Māori ‘the Māori language’ is “the Māori language”, and tangata whenua ‘people of the land; hosts’ means the people of the land: the local people, the hosts, the indigenous people.

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 meaning: the ordinary word

Te Aka gives lower-case māori four senses. None of them is a people’s name; that belongs to a separate entry, with a capital letter (below).

Sense (Te Aka)	Meaning
1. Modifier	normal, usual, natural, common, ordinary
2. Modifier	native, indigenous, fresh (of water), belonging to Aotearoa/New Zealand, freely, without restraint, without ceremony, clear, intelligible
3. Modifier	freely, without restraint, without ceremony, without object, unannounced
4. Noun	aboriginal inhabitant, indigenous person, native

Te Aka’s example of the first sense, from a journal of 1893, is a conversation about a horse. Asked whether it is a thoroughbred, the owner answers that it is he hōiho māori noa iho ‘just an ordinary horse’. Its example of the fourth sense, from 1903, has a traveller meeting “some indigenous people from the islands, from Samoa”: māori there means natives of their own islands, not New Zealand Māori. Te Aka lists toi and taketake ‘native, indigenous, long-established’ as synonyms of the “native” sense.

Where māori still means ordinary, native or fresh

The ordinary word lives on in everyday compounds, all Te Aka headwords:

Māori	Meaning (Te Aka)	Which sense
wai māori	freshwater, mineral water	fresh (of water)
manu māori	native bird, endemic bird	native
momo māori	native species	native
rongoā māori	natural remedy, traditional treatment, Māori medicine	natural, and Māori
moe māori	customary marriage, de facto marriage, common law marriage, cohabitation	usual, without ceremony
tuari māori	normal distribution (in statistics)	normal

So wai māori is not “Māori water”: it is fresh water, as opposed to the sea, and a manu māori is a native bird of any kind. The names of the birds themselves are in Māori birds and animals, and other words for the natural world in Māori nature words.

How māori became the name of a people

Before Europeans arrived, the people of these islands had no need of a single name for themselves. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, explains that with no remembered contact with other peoples they identified with smaller groups: the canoes their ancestors arrived on, their tribes and sub-tribes. That changed with contact. In Te Ara’s words, in the 19th century, “as Māori began to visit other lands and to see the newcomers as people with different languages and customs, they perceived themselves as tangata māori, ‘ordinary’ or ‘usual people’.” The newcomers got names of their own:

Māori	Te Ara’s gloss
tangata māori	ordinary or usual people: the people of the land
tangata mā	white people
tangata pora	strange people (Te Aka: pora, foreign)
tangata tupua	foreign or demonic people (Te Aka: tupua, goblin, foreigner, strange being)
Pākehā	non-Māori, European; in use by 1815

Te Aka records the result in its entry for capitalised Māori: the noun “Māori, indigenous New Zealander” is “a new use of the word resulting from Pākehā contact in order to distinguish between people of Māori descent and the colonisers”. Its other word, Pākehā, has a guide of its own: what does Pākehā mean.

The two words side by side in the Treaty of Waitangi

The Māori text of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, already uses the pair. Its preamble says the Queen wants a government established so that no harm comes ki te tangata Maori ki te Pakeha, to Māori and Pākehā, and its third article reads, as NZHistory transcribes it:

Ka tiakina e te Kuini o Ingarani nga tangata maori katoa o Nu Tirani ka tukua ki a ratou nga tikanga katoa rite tahi ki ana mea ki nga tangata o Ingarani.

The English text of the same article says the Queen “extends to the Natives of New Zealand Her royal protection”. Professor Hugh Kawharu’s modern translation of the Māori text gives ngā tangata māori katoa as “all the ordinary people of New Zealand”, and the preamble’s pair as “Maori and European”. The original is printed without macrons, as it was written in 1840.

When the name took hold: where the accounts differ

Source	What it says
Te Ara, The New Zealanders (Jock Phillips)	Māori called themselves tangata māori in the 19th century. Europeans did not use these terms: from 1769 they called the local people New Zealanders, and this continued for the next 80 years.
1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (J. S. Gully), on Te Ara	The common meaning recorded by Williams’s dictionary is “normal, usual, ordinary”, applied to birds, trees, dogs or men, so the term originally meant an ordinary man or one native to the place. Early European visitors shortened this to Maori; the term was in use before 1815 but did not appear in writing until 1850, “native” or “New Zealander” being used before then, and it came into common use only in the latter part of the 19th century.
Te Aka Māori Dictionary	The capitalised noun is a new use resulting from Pākehā contact, to tell people of Māori descent from the colonisers.

The 1966 article, which Te Ara republishes uncorrected, is presumably speaking of English writing: the Treaty’s Māori text has tangata maori in 1840. All three agree on the main point, that the name grew out of the ordinary word as a contrast with the newcomers.

Māori or māori: the capital letter

Te Aka keeps the two apart. With a capital, Māori is the people and the language, and the modifier “Māori”, as in te reo Māori, kaupapa Māori ‘Māori approach, Māori principles’, mātauranga Māori ‘Māori knowledge’ and Whakaata Māori ‘Māori Television’. In lower case, māori is the ordinary word: wai māori, manu māori. Te Aka also lists capitalised Māori as a verb, “to be Māori, apply in a Māori way”, with the example of an English loanword whose use is nonetheless Māori.

No plural s. One Māori, many Māori: NZHistory’s style guide notes that plurals of Māori words do not take an s, so not “Maoris”.
The macron. The first vowel is long, and the macron marks it: Māori, not Maori, except in old titles and documents, which NZHistory’s style guide says should not be “corrected”. Typing it is covered in how to type Māori macrons.

The same word across the Pacific

The word is older than New Zealand. In Cook Islands Māori, a separate language, māori means “of native origin, indigenous”, and Cook Islanders call their own language simply Māori, as Māori vs Cook Islands Māori explains. Hawaiian has the same word as maoli, native, genuine, as in Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians (see Māori vs Hawaiian). Te Aka’s 1903 example uses it of Samoans.

What does te reo mean in English?

Te ‘the’ is “the” and reo is, in Te Aka’s senses, “voice, sound”; “language, dialect, tongue, speech”; and “speech, utterance, statement, remark”. So te reo is “the language” (or “the voice”), and the full name te reo Māori is “the Māori language”. English is te reo Pākehā.

In New Zealand English the name is often shortened to te reo. Some style guides ask writers not to: Auckland Transport’s, for example, says to use the full term te reo Māori when referring to the Māori language, because te reo on its own “refers to language generally”, as in te reo Pākehā (English) or te reo Itāria (Italian). It adds: never say “the te reo Māori”, since te already means “the”.

The same pieces are in the names of institutions: Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori is the Māori Language Commission, and kōhanga reo ‘language nest’ is the Māori-language preschool. How te reo came close to being lost, and how many people speak it now, is in how many people speak Māori.

Tangata whenua meaning

Tangata is a person or people, and whenua is land; Te Aka also gives whenua the sense of placenta, afterbirth. Its definition of tangata whenua joins the two: “local people, hosts, indigenous people – people born of the whenua, i.e. of the placenta and of the land where the people’s ancestors have lived and where their placenta are buried.” Its example, from Te Ara, says the tangata whenua are the people who hold authority in a particular place.

In law. The Resource Management Act 1991 defines it place by place: tangata whenua, “in relation to a particular area, means the iwi, or hapu, that holds mana whenua over that area”, and mana whenua is “customary authority exercised by an iwi or hapu in an identified area”.
On a marae. The tangata whenua are the hosts who welcome the manuhiri ‘visitors’: see what happens at a pōwhiri.
As a verb. Te Aka also gives tangata whenua as a verb, to be natural or at home, and to be naturalised or acclimatised: its examples speak of a language becoming natural to children and a tree becoming naturalised in these islands.

It is set beside Pākehā, tauiwi and manuhiri in the related-words table of what does Pākehā mean.

Aotearoa meaning

Aotearoa, the Māori name for New Zealand, is usually translated “land of the long white cloud”, from ao ‘cloud’, tea ‘white’ and roa ‘long’. Te Aka gives it first as the North Island, now used for the whole country, and the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand lists other readings, among them “land of abiding day”. The readings and the story behind the cloud are in Māori place names.

How to say Māori

Three vowels, each said: Mā-o-ri. The macron makes the first one long, roughly the a of car in a New Zealand or British accent; the o is short, as in ordinary; the i is like the vowel of eat (Victoria University’s comparisons). The r is a single quick tap of the tongue. The phonetic literature counts ao among the Māori diphthongs, so the first two vowels can run together, but the glide still goes from a long a to an o. Every vowel, and what the macron does, is in the Māori pronunciation guide.

Going further

māori, te reo, tangata whenua and wai are all words you meet early in our free te reo Māori course, which teaches them in sentences, one lesson a day.