What does Kai mean in Hawaiian?
Kai is a Hawaiian unisex name that means sea. The name comes from kai (sea, seawater). It is pronounced KYE, with 1 syllable. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Kai belongs with other Hawaiian names about ocean and water.
Kai in other languages
Kai is the sea — specifically the salt water near shore, as against moana, the open ocean beyond the reef. It is the single most productive element in modern Hawaiian naming.
It is also a name in several unrelated languages, which is why it is so widely given: Kai is used in Japanese, in Welsh, in German and Scandinavian usage as a short form of older names, and in Māori with the same Polynesian sense of food or the sea. A child named Kai is carrying a word that lands in a lot of places at once.
The words inside Kai
kai means sea, seawater and appears in 12 Hawaiian names, among them Kailani, Kaimana, ʻAukai, Kaikoa.
How to pronounce Kai
Say every vowel. The vowels in Kai are a as in “father”, i as “ee”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Kai a boy or girl name?
Kai is unisex. Hawaiian has no grammatical gender, and most traditional names were given to any child.
How often Kai is given in the U.S.
Social Security records show 70,007 U.S. babies named Kai since 1926, but that spelling is also a Scandinavian, German, Japanese and Chinese name, so the count says little about the Hawaiian name. In Hawaiʻi itself, 1,010 babies born in the state were named Kai from 1973 to 2021, with a peak of 56 in 2021. 383 were born there from 2012 to 2021.
How well recorded is Kai?
Kai has its own entry among Wiktionary’s documented Hawaiian given names.