What does Emalani mean in Hawaiian?
Emalani is a Hawaiian girl name that means royal Emma. The name comes from Ema (Emma) + lani (royal). It is pronounced eh-mah-LAH-nee, with 4 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Queen Emma of Hawaiʻi was known as Emalani.
Emalani belongs with other Hawaiian names about royalty.
Queen Emma
Emalani is Queen Emma Kaleleonālani, consort of Kamehameha IV. With her husband she founded Queen's Hospital in 1859, in response to introduced diseases that were killing Hawaiians in enormous numbers; it is still the largest hospital in the islands.
In 1871 she made a celebrated journey into the Alakaʻi swamp on Kauaʻi, accompanied by a large party, and the chants composed about that trip are still performed. She stood for election as queen in 1874 and lost to Kalākaua.
The name is the Hawaiian form of Emma with lani added: royal Emma.
The words inside Emalani
lani means sky, heaven and appears in 53 Hawaiian names, among them Kailani, Kalani, Leilani, Lani.
How to pronounce Emalani
Say every vowel. The vowels in Emalani are e as in “bet”, a as in “father”, i as “ee”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Emalani a boy or girl name?
Emalani is used mainly as a girl's name, though Hawaiian itself has no grammatical gender.
How often Emalani is given in the U.S.
Social Security records show 5 U.S. babies named Emalani from 2017 to 2023, all girls. It appears in 1 of those 7 years. Its peak was 2017, with 5. In the Hawaiʻi records it never reaches five births of one sex in a year, the level at which a name is listed.
How well recorded is Emalani?
Emalani is built from vocabulary recorded in Pukui–Elbert, the standard Hawaiian dictionary, but it has no entry among documented Hawaiian given names.